I'm jumping in to Facebook. I'm not terribly social by nature. In fact, my favorite T-shirt reads, "You read my shirt. That's enough social interaction for one day." But, I really need to get on board and keep on learning.
I'm going to give it a try. Maybe since it isn't face-to-face it will be easier. I'll blog about it next week.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Web 2.0 Week 4 - Flickr and Mashups
Flickr
Flickr is a web service that allows users to store photos and videos and share them with other users. If you aren't into PhotoShop and advanced photo editing, it is a nice way to keep your personal photos organized and off your hard drive. It is a way of easily sharing them with others.
I see the educational value of Flickr because it is a repository for all sorts of photos and videos. Students would be able to use Flickr to search for graphics that enhance their multimedia projects. I worry about appropriateness and quality, however.
I would want students to find only things that they need. For example, if I have a student designing a multimedia project on Mexico, he needs photos that relate to the country, its customs, etc. and not tacky photos of half-drunken gringos from New Jersey who happened to visit Cancún last summer. ¿Verdad?
For elementary students, I would suggest that the teacher locates and downloads a bank of images from which the students may select images for their projects. It is more time-consuming for the teacher, but it can help avoid unpleasant situations where students find inappropriate, but not necessarily explicit images.
Mashups
A mashup is a hybrid web application. One web application utilizes data from another source and creates a new application or service from combining the two. To really understand mashups, you have to know what an API is.
APIs are "application programming interfaces." Webopedia has a good definition for lay people, “a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A programmer then puts the blocks together.”
So, a mashup uses APIs and data from other places to make something new. It doesn't require the user to do a bunch of fancy programming in order to take the data and make something new out of it.
Flickr is a web service that allows users to store photos and videos and share them with other users. If you aren't into PhotoShop and advanced photo editing, it is a nice way to keep your personal photos organized and off your hard drive. It is a way of easily sharing them with others.
I see the educational value of Flickr because it is a repository for all sorts of photos and videos. Students would be able to use Flickr to search for graphics that enhance their multimedia projects. I worry about appropriateness and quality, however.
I would want students to find only things that they need. For example, if I have a student designing a multimedia project on Mexico, he needs photos that relate to the country, its customs, etc. and not tacky photos of half-drunken gringos from New Jersey who happened to visit Cancún last summer. ¿Verdad?
For elementary students, I would suggest that the teacher locates and downloads a bank of images from which the students may select images for their projects. It is more time-consuming for the teacher, but it can help avoid unpleasant situations where students find inappropriate, but not necessarily explicit images.
Mashups
A mashup is a hybrid web application. One web application utilizes data from another source and creates a new application or service from combining the two. To really understand mashups, you have to know what an API is.
APIs are "application programming interfaces." Webopedia has a good definition for lay people, “a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A programmer then puts the blocks together.”
So, a mashup uses APIs and data from other places to make something new. It doesn't require the user to do a bunch of fancy programming in order to take the data and make something new out of it.
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