Web Tools Application

   

I.Merlot Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

        MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.   MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

MERLOT's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses.

MERLOT’s activities are based on the creative collaboration and support of its Individual Members, 
Institutional Partners, Corporate Partners and Editorial Boards. 

Integral to MERLOT’s continuing development of faculty development support services are its:

•       Building and sustaining online academic communities

•       Online teaching and learning initiatives

•       Building, organizing, reviewing, and developing applications of online teaching-learning materials

MERLOT maintains its currency through ongoing and continuing communication with its worldwide supporters in a variety of ways, including the annual MERLOT International Conference, the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT), member publications, news, and our new Voices website to enable MERLOT users to communication with others.

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II.Lecturefox: Free University Lectures
What is Lecturefox?

It’s all about the joy of learning.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category “faculty mix” you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

LectureFox: Get Free University Lectures From Around The World

 Numerous universities upload their lectures online for the benefit of their own students and the general public. Now using a web service called “LectureFox” you get an aggregated view of these uploaded lectures of various universities. LectureFox is a free to use web service that aggregates the publicly available online lectures of numerous universities. The site specified the course title along with university name, and the type of lectures available – video, audio, or notes. Clicking on a lecture title takes you to its corresponding university URL where the lecture is available from.

Features:

·         A user-friendly web service.

·         Aggregates online lectures available to the public.

·         Covers numerous topics and courses.

·         Describes lecture type – video, audio, and notes.

·         Similar tools: TalkMiner, MBAvid and Snoozerr.

·         Also read related articles:

6 Really Good Sites with FREE Video Lectures from Top US Colleges
5 Great Sites with Free Video Lectures from Top Colleges
Fora.tv – Free Video Lectures & Talks From Brilliant People.

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III.WIKIS

What is it?

A wiki is a Web page that can be viewed and modified by anybody with a Web browser and access to the Internet. This means that any visitor to the wiki can change its content if they desire. While the potential for mischief exists, wikis can be surprisingly robust, open-ended, collaborative group sites. Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the Internet. Variously described as a composition system, a discussion medium, a repository, a mail system, and a tool for collaboration, wikis provide users with both author and editor privileges; the overall organization of contributions can be edited as well as the content itself. Wikis are able to incorporate sounds, movies, and pictures; they may prove to be a simple tool to create multimedia presentations and simple digital stories. According to The Wiki Way, “‘[O]pen editing’ has some profound and subtle effects on the wiki’s usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site...encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.”2 Because the user interface is familiar—a Web page on a personal computer—barriers to modifying wiki pages are minimal. Plus, the results of the users’ actions on the content of nthe site are instantly visible to other users.

How does it work?

Technically, a wiki is a combination of a CGI script and a collection of plain text files that allows users to create Web pages “on the fly.” All it takes is a connection to the Internet and a Web browser. When you click a wiki page’s “Edit” link, the script sends the raw text file to your browser in an editable form, allowing you to modify the content of the page. Pressing the “Save” button sends the modified text back to the wiki server, which replaces the existing text file with your changed version for all to see. When you request a wiki page, the script gathers the corresponding text file, changes its marked-up text into HTML, turns user-selected words into hyperlinks, inserts this information into a page template, and sends the result to your browser.

Why is it significant?

Wikis offer a powerful yet flexible collaborative communication tool for developing content-specific Web sites. Because wikis grow and evolve as a direct result of people adding material to the site, they can address a variety of pedagogical needs—student involvement, group activities, and so on. Since wikis reside on the Internet, students can access and participate from any location, provided they have Internet access. From an instructional technology perspective, wikis allow faculty and students to engage in collaborative activities that might not be possible in a classroom. Their flexibility will encourage broader adoption—by both students and faculty.

What are the downsides?

Because users can modify the content of a wiki (add to, edit, delete materials), allowing such manipulation of the site’s information carries some risks. Thus, wikis are often monitored to ensure that inappropriate language, spam, and incorrect or inappropriate content are not allowed. This can be both time-consuming and personnel-intensive. As a result, many wikis require authorization so only group members can modify content. A wiki is essentially a database created by a group rather than an individual. Structuring the initial content in such a database for easy access can be a challenge—one that faculty might not have encountered before. How one accesses information on the wiki, navigates the site, creates internal and external links to additional information, and so forth needs to be addressed early. Another shortcoming of a wiki (albeit a minor one) is that it represents the collective perspective of the group that uses it—a wiki has a collaborative bias. Over time, the values, perspectives, and opinions of its users can become embedded in a wiki. Wikis are well suited to reflecting current thoughts but perhaps not aseffective in obtaining unbiased perspectives on rapidly evolving topics or issues.

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Wikis might be the easiest and most effective Web-based collaboration tool in any instructional portfolio. Their inherent simplicity provides students with direct (and immediate) access to a site’s content, which is crucial in group editing or other collaborative project activities. A wiki’s versioning capability can show the evolution of thought processes as students interact with the site and its contents. These collaborative projects help promote “pride of authorship” and ownership in the team’s activities. In addition, wikis are being used as e-portfolios, illustrating their utility as a tool for collection and reflection. Collaboration using a wiki is not limited to students. Faculty can use wikis to collaborate on projects, whether editing a textbook, preparing a journal article, or assembling a syllabus or reading list. Wikis might also prove to be an ideal vehicle for soliciting ongoing input for research or projects where community input can help inform and direct subsequent investigation. The possibilities for using wikis as the platform for collaborative projects are limited only by one’s imagination and time. Wikienabled projects can provide various levels of site access and control to team members, offering a fine-tuning element that enhances the teaching and learning experience.


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IV.Evoca

Evoca says that “Everyone’s voice counts”

 

They launched Evoca in 2006 as a voice-to-web subscription service to make it easy to record and publish anyone’s voice using mobile, landline and smartphones, tablets and computers. From the start, we introduced better and faster ways to create valuable audio content from solo voice recordings, interviews, conference calls, Skype calls, and record directly from an online recorder used with any computer microphone. We went on to offer online record plugins for popular blog and web software such as WordPress, Drupal, Blogger, and TypePad. On the publishing side, streaming voice is one of our strengths. Posting MP3 recordings for playback through player widgets on blogs and websites was an early feature that we have expanded to posting to Facebook and Twitter.

The second platform, Evoca Enterprise™, is our enterprise-class multimedia software platform that integrates many of the same voice recording, management, and publishing features – and more – with the added benefit of being completely “brandable” and highly scalable. It is an ideal option for companies and other web services to integrate useful Evoca features using our flexible application programming interface [RESTful HTTP API.]

All of your recordings are securely stored in our proprietary application that instantly converts all recordings into MP3 format. Customers, followers, and fans can playback from any smartphone, tablet or web browser since we auto-detect browsers to stream using Flash, iFrame, or HTML audio tags.

Make voice a choice and put the power of Evoca to work for you:

How It Works section to learn more.

§                     Turn any phone — mobile, smartphone or landline — into a digital recorder — using any worldwide Evoca phone number

§                     Record solo voices – your own or your followers, fans, or customers

§                     Record phone interviews

§                     Record phone conference calls

§                     Record Skype calls — solo voices, interviews, and conference calls

§                     Invite recording by phone or online recorder from your audience with a Local or Toll-free Plan

§                     Save and access MP3 recordings online through our secure cloud computing technology

§                     Share voice online and by email for playback online or from any smartphone or tablet

§                     Add standard or customizable players to your website or blog

§                     Capture blog comments and publish the ones you want for others to listen in

§                     Customize welcome messages for your dedicated, private phone number

§                     Get local or toll-free numbers that customers call to record their opinions and stories

§                     Quickly post voice updates to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress blogs

Evoca is the perfect tool for journalists, educators, students, marketers, candidates, writers, researchers, storytellers, genealogists, business people, and more.  Try it free for 30 days or sign upfor a Pro, Local, or Toll-free subscription to start creating recordings of any length and keep it private or share it with the world.

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V. JORUM 
Jorum is a free online repository service for UK Further and Higher Education. Funded by the JISC, it supports the collection and sharing of learning and teaching materials, and allows their reuse and repurposing.

Jorum aims to promote the sharing, reuse and repurposing of resources for the long-term. It stands as a national statement of the importance of creating interoperable, sustainable materials, supporting individuals, teaching teams, collaborative groups and communities in the development and sharing of resources.a

Jorum is based on an institutionally registered User and Contributor licensing model and is run by Mimas, the national data centre based at the University of Manchester. Prior to 1 August 2011, it had been collaboratively hosted by Mimas and Edina, the national data centre at the University of Edinburgh.

Finding resources in Jorum

Searching and browsing for resources in Jorum is easy, via the search box at the top of each page of the website. You can enter any search term, which will return a list of any resources matching your search criteria.

Anyone can search for and download resources from Jorum, providing you respect the terms and conditions of use as specified in the resource's licence, and Jorum's Terms of Service.

You will not need to log in to view and find resources in Jorum that have been deposited under a Creative Commons (CC) licence, as these are “open access”. 

Jorum offers open Creative Commons licences

Creative Commons (CC) licences

Creative Commons (CC) licences permit varying degrees of copying and reuse of content, and can be used to license resources known as Open Educational Resources (OER). Anyone can download, reuse and repurpose OER within the terms and conditions of use in the resource’s CC licence. Resources shared under these licence options are the most flexible and the one that is required for use in the OER Programme. All content released under the OER Programme will have the tag ‘ukoer’.

There are a number of reasons to use Jorum

·   Jorum offers a ‘keepsafe’ for resources; securely stored and professionally managed

·   Participate in the advancement, embedding and sustainability of e-learning across the UK

·   Promote electronic resources to peers across the UK, and beyond by assisting their teaching and allowing them to repurpose the work to suit their needs

·   Many projects need to disseminate resource outputs to comply with their funding. Jorum can help fulfil this requirement.

Sharing your resources can benefit others who teach and learn, and allow them to learn from your expertise. Sharing your resources can also act as a showcase for you and your institution.

Support

The Discuss area of the Jorum website aims to support knowledge exchange and discussion on all aspects of sharing, re-use and repurposing of learning and teaching resources. As well as aggregating useful links, tools, software, blogs, case studies and reports. This is the place to contribute to online discussions on repurposing and sharing, for beginners and experts alike. A discussion forum has also been set up for UKOER projects in the Sharing Resources area.

Impact on the learning provider

ILT has brought about significant changes in the way programmes are delivered and Jorum is an essential component of the infrastructure required for this to happen. Improvements in the quality of teaching and learning are evident in the variety of resources deployed by teaching staff and the experiences reported by learners.

Impact on the learner

Learners have access to a much wider range of quality assured resources and learning materials from authoritative sources.

Key messages

Jorum is a free online repository service for UK Further and Higher Education. It supports the collection and sharing of learning and teaching materials, and allows their reuse and repurposing.

Improvements in the quality of teaching and learning are evident in the variety of resources deployed by teaching staff and the experiences reported by learners.

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VI. ClassTool.net

  ClassTools.net is a free website for teachers and students to create interactive educational games, activities and diagrams for learning and reviewing factual material. Free Flash templates can be used "as is" or may be customized to create interactive games and activities in multiple formats from a single set of 10-25 questions and answers on any given topic. Speed and difficulty of play increases incrementally with each new level of the game, which is scored both for time and accuracy.
      The site offers a variety of template tools that promote organizational and analytical skills acquisition for every grade level from K-12 and beyond. Timelines, diagrams, graphic organizer tools, and essay planning tools appropriate for every grade level are offered and readily accessed with the click of a mouse. A source analyzer can be used by research students to evaluate and determine the usefulness and reliability of printed and online research source materials. Additionally, teachers can access an accelerated learning planning tool that addresses multiple intelligences and learning styles.

   ClassTools.net is a free service teachers can use to create their own educational games. Games made onClassTools.net can be shared via email or embedded into a blog or website. (Yet another reason for having a class website or blog). ClassTools.netprovides fifteen easy to use templates with which teachers can make educational games for their students. There are also pre-made games onClassTools.net which teachers will find useful.

  ClassTools.net can be used to learn and review factual material in a fun and engaging way, and to reinforce certain concepts. It's an excellent tool for test preparation both inside and outside of the classroom.

As an individual homework assignment, upper elementary students might prepare a list of questions pertaining to a unit of study, such as "Rivers of the World" for a 3rd grade Geography class. In class, students could work in small groups to identify the best answers to the questions, then use the Arcade Game/Flashcard Generator tool to create a set of interactive games and flashcards. This provides an engaging means of learning and reviewing factual content information

   With no membership fees or login requirement, the templates for educational games and activities are readily accessible and can be used easily and effectively by both teachers and students. Diagrams can be saved as data files and embedded onto a website or blog. A video tutorial and sample artifacts are provided to get you started, along with suggestions for lesson plans. The teacher can password protect the question & answer master page and also has the ability to track student progress. Access to a computer and the Internet are all that is required.

   I highly recommend this site to both teachers and students. It provides many engaging tools for delivery and review of factual information in any subject area. Activities and games can be used individually and collaboratively by students and teacher. One drawback is that the embedit widget does not work on interactive games and I found the FAQs were not very helpful.

Applications for Educators

    Games and puzzles are good review tools for students. The templates onClassTools.net are flexible enough to be used with students of most grade levels and content areas. Rather than relying on pre-made games from expensive textbook publishers take advantage of the flexibility of the ClassTools.net templates to create games specific to your curriculum and your students.

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VII. Twitter

Things you should know about Twitter...

What is it?

Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, part cell phone/IM tool, designed to let users answer the question “What are you doing?” Users have 140 characters for each posting (or “tweet”) to say whatever they care to say. Many tweets do answer the question of what the user is doing, but plenty of others are responses to other tweets, pointers to online resources that the user found interesting, musings, or questions. Similar to social networking sites like Facebook—which has itself evolved to include mini-updates—Twitter lets users create formal friendships, which collectively establish numerous and interconnected networks of users. In addition, Twitter works with cell phones and other SMS clients, making it an easy way for mobile users to stay in touch virtually anywhere.

Who’s doing it?

Although Twitter launched in March 2006, the number of Twitterers and the amount of attention the site has received grew considerably in the first half of 2007. A lot of people are talking about it, and plenty are using it, including some presidential candidates, well-known high-tech gurus, and celebrities. Although it’s unclear whether college students are using Twitter in large numbers, many IT professionals in higher education have become active users, as have a number of faculty. In many cases, a Twitterer is not an individual but a group of people, an organization (or part of it), or an event. Live Earth 2007, for example, a global concert to increase awareness of climate change, has a Twitter profile that featured updates leading up to the event. Dell maintains a Twitter profile that advertises short-term (a number of hours or days) promotional specials on computers and other hardware. Opinion Journal, an offshoot of the Wall Street Journal, has a Twitter profile, as does Reuters, which posts new headlines with links to the full stories.

How does it work?

After creating an account, you can personalize your profile page and enter tweets into a text field. Unless your tweets are protected, they appear on a “public timeline” page, which displays all public tweets in reverse chronological order, like a series of “micro-blogs.” Each tweet identifies the Twitterer, whose screen name links to that person’s profile page, showing all of her previous tweets and her friends’ tweets. If you are registered, you can add her as a friend, see a list of her friends, and add any of those people as your friends. Once you have established at least one friend relationship, your Twitter home page shows the tweets posted by you and your friends, though you can still access the public timeline separately. You can also send private messages to friends or post a direct reply to another tweet. All of the Twitter functions are available through SMS. If you provide Twitter with a cell phone number or IM contact information, you can “follow” individual users, even if you are not friends with them. By choosing to follow a user, you will be notified by phone, IM, or both any time that person posts a new tweet. Twitter integrates with blogs and other Web pages, providing Flash and JavaScript code options that allow Web pages to access Twitter updates. Twitter also provides RSS, which allows news aggregators to subscribe to individual feeds, which can be one Twitterer’s posts, your friends’ tweets, or the public timeline.

Why is it significant?

The experience of using Twitter has been described as walking into a room of conversations and looking for a “hook” to decide if and when to jump in. While some people find the public timeline interesting and collect hundreds—if not thousands—of friends and followers, many see the value of Twitter in keeping connected with a select group of colleagues and acquaintances through a shared space. Tweets offer information about a person—likes, dislikes, frustrations—that might never make it into a professional conversation. Some of the information is trivial, some boring, and some perhaps better kept private, but the sum of all this information can be getting to know someone quite well, warts and all. For colleagues who don’t live in the same town, Twitter can serve as a “virtual water cooler” where people talk about work, the weather, sports, or anything else that comes up. Twitter’s networking component lets you make connections with your friends’ friends, and this dynamic can lead to serendipitous professional or personal relationships with other Twitterers. Twitter creates a new channel of communication, but it also facilitates a new way of seeing and understanding people: although most individual tweets say very little, ardent Twitterers say that the magic comes from following people over time, developing a sense of who they really are and knowing—at nearly any moment—what they are doing and how they feel about it.

What are the downsides?

The most common criticism of Twitter is that it enables inane interaction. Tweets that say nothing more than “I’m eating pickles” or “Really tired today” are not uncommon, and, indeed, the value of such postings to the casual user is minimal. Moreover, as an asynchronous broadcast service, there is no guarantee that any individual tweet will be read, let alone responded to. Twitter can also be a distraction for frequent and committed users. If you follow Twitterers on your phone or by IM, or if you find yourself constantly checking the Web site for updates, Twitter can be a time eater. If you interact with the site through a cell phone, the SMS charges can accumulate rapidly, and the sheer number of updates— particularly if you have a large number of friends or friends who are active users—can be unwieldy.

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Much has been written about the benefits of active learning strategies —using tools and techniques that engage students in ways other than simply listening to an instructor and taking notes. In the same way that clickers facilitate active learning, Twitter, too, could be used in an academic setting to foster interaction about a given topic. Metacognition—the practice of thinking about and reflecting on your learning—has been shown to benefit comprehension and retention. As a tool for students or professional colleagues to compare thoughts about a topic, Twitter can be a viable platform for metacognition, forcing users to be brief and to the point—an important skill in thinking clearly and communicating effectively. In addition, Twitter can provide a simple way for attendees at a conference to share thoughts about particular sessions and activities with others at the event and those unable to attend.

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VIII. Etudes

An etude is an instrumental musical composition, most commonly of considerable difficulty, usually designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular technical skill. The tradition of writing études emerged in the early 19th century with the rapidly growing popularity of the piano. Of the vast number of études from that era some are still used as teaching material (particularly pieces by Carl Czerny and Muzio Clementi), and a few, by major composers such as Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Claude Debussy and Charles-Valentin Alkan, achieved a place in today's concert repertory. Composers of the 20th century variously composed études related to the old tradition (György Ligeti), études that required wholly unorthodox technique (John Cage), and études that required unusually facile technique.

            Etudes is a non-profit 501(c)(3), organization that offers centralized hosting, support, site and account management, training and professional development opportunities to institutions and organizations that need a turn-key, fully-managed course management solution. As an Application Services Provider, Etudes supports over 270,000 student enrollments annually across 25 client institutions with its platform. 
            Additionally, Etudes leads open source software development, focusing on building content authoring, collaboration and assessment tools, with an emphasis on e-learning and the needs of its Etudes users and clients. Read what our clients have to say about the value of Etudes.

              Etudes is a community of institutions and individuals who are supporting teaching, learning, and collaboration, and expanding educational opportunities to learners through the organization's platform and support infrastructure. Serving about 125,000 students, Etudes is the platform for delivering, managing, and supporting instruction across 25 higher education institutions. 
The Value of Etudes

        Online instruction is great for faculty and students. They love it. But, it's a high-maintenance proposition. Many faculty and students are online at hours that I don't have staff. And, my network systems aren't built to deliver 99.999% of reliability on a 24/7 basis. That's the risk! I've noticed schools that try to host themselves and struggle. 
             With Etudes, I don't worry. We've been with Etudes for two years now. They are on a secure site and are 99.999% available. We have had no down-time and no glitches. I don't get any complaints. That's a good thing for me. 

The other thing that attracted us to Etudes is the cost point. Because Etudes is a non-profit consortium, the membership isn't in the business of making money. It is in the business of covering its costs and evolving the product. It's a little like owing a condominium. We charge what is needed to make the thing sustainable. And that means, from El Camino College's point of view, that we'll pay less than we would with a commercial vendor - in fact, we pay a lot less. 

Dr. John Wagstaff, CIO
El Camino College

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IX. Web Widgets

Widget is a generic term for the part of a GUI that allows the user to interface with the application and operating system. Widgets display information and invite the user to act in a number of ways. Typical widgets include buttons, dialog boxes, pop-up windows, pull-down menus, icons, scroll bars, resizable window edges, progress indicators, selection boxes, windows, tear-off menus, menu bars, toggle switches and forms.

A widget is a stand-alone application that can be embedded into third party sites by any user on a page where they have rights of authorship (e.g. a webpage, blog, or profile on a social media site). Widgets allow users to turn personal content into dynamic web apps that can be shared on websites where the code can be installed. For example, a "Weather Report Widget" could report today's weather by accessing data from the Weather Channel, it could even be sponsored by the Weather Channel. Should you want to put that widget on your own Facebook profile, you could do this by copying and pasting the embed code into your profile on Facebook.

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X. CLASS BLOGMEISTER

      Learning as Conversation

Some reasons to consider using it instead of other tools are:
About Class Blogmeister

Perhaps one of the most fascinating tools that has emerged from the Internet cloud in recent years is the Blog. A shortening of the term Web log, the Blog is an online publishing tool that enables people to easily publish their loves, passions, dislikes, peeves, discoveries, and insights.

Thousands of teachers have discovered the value of classroom blogging, both as an avenue for their communications, but also as a tool for giving voice to what their students are learning and how they are learning.

Class Blogmeister is one of several blogging engines that have been developed specifically for classroom use. You are welcome to explore the writings of teachers and students alike.

Class Blogmeister is a free tool created by David Warlick for classroom blogging. It is an engine tool that was highly developed for classroom usage. A lot of practitioners like teachers around the globe have explored and realized that this webtool can enhance great chance in getting high learning to students aside from the old school scenario. The learning would also be extended on air, in the chosen free time of the student.

1. Supports the writing process, teachers can leave comments/feedback behind the scenes for students before articles are published.
2. Easy and straightforward, doesn't require lots of technical tweaking.
3. Students have their own blogs: Gives more ownership to students.
4. Permits full teacher moderation of posts and comments.
5. Is in use by a lot of teachers, a good support network exists to get help
6. Is supported by an active and growing discussion list of users athttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/classblogmeister/
7. Because of 5 and 6, above, there is very much a sense of community with teachers and students who use classblogmeister.
8. Consistency of the interface is very helpful for students who are reading and commenting on the blogs of other students.

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XI. Flickr

Things you should know about Flickr

What is it?

Flickr is a photo-sharing website where anyone can upload and tag photos, browse others’ photos, and add comments and annotations. Users can create photo sets and collections to manage content, and participate in topical groups to cultivate a sense of community. Launched in February 2004, Flickr embodies what has come to be known as Web 2.0 technology. The site provides the tools, but the value derives from the contributions of the user community—photos, comments, ratings, and organization—and the connections that the site facilitates between individuals. Flickr also provides a range of privacy settings, giving users considerable control over how their photos can be used.

Who’s doing it?

While it is not the most popular photo-sharing site, Flickr has a very loyal and engaged user base among Web 2.0 users and strong name recognition among the general public. The site has more than two billion images and 20 million unique tags, and its collaborative tools have made it popular in higher education. Some faculty have begun using Flickr images in their courses, and art schools, biologists, and others use the site to share, critique, and

analyze visual information. In a partnership with the Library of Congress, Flickr recently introduced

a new project called The Commons, in which 3,100 images from the Library of Congress are posted on a special section of Flickr. Visitors can add tags and comments or speculate about the provenance or significance of each image. In this way, The Commons is designed both to increase access to the collections held by civic institutions and also to enable the generation of collective knowledge by soliciting input from anyone about the items in the collection. Interestingly, the Library of Congress has its own online catalogue of prints and photographs; that the library chose to partner with Flickr suggests that organizers saw more potential in going “where the people are” than in hosting such an application on the Library of Congress website.

How does it work?

Flickr offers free accounts, which have limits on bandwidth and the number of groups in which each photo can be included, and paid accounts. Using any of several tools or an online form, registered users can upload photos to the site, assign tags, indicate whether each photo is public or private, and select other settings, including copyright, which can be traditional “all rights reserved” or any more of the Creative Commons licenses. Copyright settings can vary for different photos. Users can also specify who can add comments, tags, or annotations—notes specifically about highlighted portions of an image—to their photos, and each photo can also include information about how and where it was taken. Photos can be organized by groups, which also serve as community topics.

A group might be called “wooden canoes,” and photos included in that group (from multiple contributors) will appear on its page along with a list of the group’s members and a discussion board, for which an RSS feed is available. Flickr photos integrate nicely with blogs, and the site offers an API, which allows developers to write other applications that can interact with Flickr content. For each photo, the contributor’s name links to that user’s profile page. Tags and group names link to dynamic collections of all Flickr material similarly identified. Profile pages include details provided by the contributor, as well as testimonials from other users and an e-mail tool to send private messages to that contributor. The result is an always-changing network of collections and connections, fostering a strong sense of community among users.

Why is it significant?

Photo-sharing sites offer vast collections of images that are not available anywhere else because they are owned and contributed by individuals. As a result, the range of visual resources for a specific topic is enormous. Although Flickr is ostensibly for photos, however, the site might more aptly be described as a venue for sharing experiences and building relationships. User-generated content is a hallmark of emerging technologies, and for most users, photos represent an extremely low barrier to entry for sharing creative work. Students and faculty alike often have many photos that never find an audience. By making photos easy to share, Flickr demonstrates that contribution can be easy and that almost any shared object can find an audience. The ability to engage in a conversation about a photo, and to update that photo based on comments received, builds a sense of community. Indeed, Flickr users have been described as passionate in their use of the site and their belief in its value. Moreover, the ubiquity and simplicity of digital cameras have made amateur photographers out of millions of people, and sites like Flickr provide a place to share photos and meet people with similar interests, even if photography is not their focus. Flickr’s support for Creative  Commons licenses adds another venue for discussion about the evolving nature of copyright in the digital era.

What are the downsides?

Any online service that hosts content raises questions about the reliability of that service and its terms of use. Institutions of higher education are generally wary of depending on a commercial service for academic content, which potentially limits Flickr’s usefulness in teaching and learning. As with any user-created taxonomy, or “folksonomy,” Flickr’s tags are subject to the mistakes of the users who enter them. The site includes more than a thousand photos tagged with the term “Mexcio,” for example, and anyone searching for content by “Mexico” spelled properly won’t find them. Flickr largely depends on the community to police itself for copyright violations, and opportunities for libel or invasions of privacy abound. Moreover, despite the range of features that allow users to comment on photos, the vast majority of remarks are positive, even glowing, leaving one to wonder how much value they provide.

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Flickr affords an opportunity for students studying photography or other art-related subjects to receive feedback and engage with a community of experts and amateur enthusiasts, exposing students to the reality of professional practice. This dynamic can be extended to other fields, as evidenced by the success that digital storytelling projects have had in using visual media to share personal experiences. Students who are engaged with content demonstrate better learning outcomes, and the immediacy of visual media facilitates that sense of connection to subject material. At the same time, Flickr exposes students to participatory learning by capitalizing on the ubiquity of digital cameras and students’ desire to share their creative work. By introducing users to social, collaborative technologies, Flickr provides an easy, comfortable platform for students to engage with content and a community in the process of collective knowledge creation.

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XII. dgCommunities is now Zunia

There are changes made to dgCommunities to better meet your needs. In order to reflect the improvements, we are also rebranding dgCommunities and calling it Zunia. Check out the new site at: http://www.zunia.org

The main improvements include:  

·             Coverage of wider range of development issues

·             Ability to sign up for customized email alerts

·             Better search

·             Instant publication of user contributed content

·             Improved web layout

What is Zunia? 

Zunia provides a space of knowledge-sharing among development practitioners worldwide. Users can access and post news, events, best practices and publications that are searchable online and receive e-mail alerts on topics of their interest.

Why should I become a member?

Membership is free and open to all interested individuals. While you do not need to be a member to access information on Zunia, being a member has many advantages. As a member you can:

·             Post news, events, publications etc

·             Receive customized email alerts and set up filters

·             Create a profile

·             Network with 60,000+ Zunia members and contact them online

How do I sign up to be a member?

If you want to sign up to be a member, click on the "Join Now" link on the top right hand corner of this page and fill out the short online form. Membership is free and open to all interested individuals.

How can I post content?

You can share your news, events and publications with a broader audience by posting it on Zunia. You need to be a registered member to do this. To contribute content, go to the Zunia homepage and click on the "New Post" link on the right hand column. If you are not logged on already, you will need to sign in before you can post on Zunia. Once you have signed in, fill out the submission page with the title, summary, link (or file) and relevant tags and save your post.

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