Flickr / Red Sox / Math = Yay!

For my Web 2.0 assignment I set up a Flickr account, uploaded a few pictures, and tagged them. The overall process was fairly simple:

1. Sign up for account. This was easy partially because when I first visited the site there was a very large “sign-up” link. I clicked it and it allowed me to input information that would allow me to upload my pictures.
2. Choose pictures to upload. Next I wanted to choose a few pictures off of my computer that I thought other people would want to see. I knew that I would later be adding “tags” to my pictures which would allow other Flickr users to search for tags thus, I knew others may be viewing my pictures. I picked a collection of pictures from a Red Sox game I went to. I picked a few of my favorites and selected them to be uploaded.
3. Wait for pictures to upload. Fast and very easy!
4. Add titles for each picture. I wanted simple titles that described the pictures so I used one or two words that were either a name of a player or a name of the action that was being had in the picture.
5. Add a short description of each picture. Next I added a sentence long description of each picture that would be seen by visitors to the website.
6. Add “tags” for each picture. These were the tags that I knew others would use to search for my pictures. Most of the pictures had tags similar to “red sox,” “Boston,” or the player’s name.
7. Publish pictures. The final step was to publish the album so that it could be seen by others which left me with the link below.
8. http://www.flickr.com/photos/27356176@N07/

The learning process was very simple because I already knew all of the terminology that would be needed to complete the upload and tagging of pictures. Some terms to consider were “upload,” “tags,” and “publish.” Though I have never used this site in particular many other sites use similar terms which allowed me switching to this site very easy.

Through this experience I see how digital literacy could have made this a much more difficult process for someone who is unfamiliar with the internet, internet terminology, or what it means to “tag” a picture. I know that if my grandmother tried to do this same project she would have not been able to do it or it would have taken a very long time where, for me, it took only 15 to 20 minutes. Overall, I’m not sure this website could be used as teaching tool. I did a search for “math” and it came up with some interesting pictures of math in nature, though, which could be interesting to study in Calculus or advanced math classes.