Using Flickr to share images

Last week a student asked me if there was any central repository of images of the University (buildings, lecture theatres, labs, etc) that can be reused and embedded into coursework. I'm not sure if there is, so thought we could start one ourselves, which would help them, but also help many other students. It might also educate them a little around issues to do with copyright, and in particular, the Creative Commons licenses (I've done a separate post about CC here).

So Flickr has many facets: Sets, Groups, Gallaries, etc. I have opted to create a Public Group (although you can have different permissions, such as 'invite-only groups' if you want something a little more private), and I am the lead Moderator and Administrator for the group - if needed, it's easy enough to give other people Moderator access as well.

Students can easily join the group - Multimedia @ MMU - from the group page: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mmu_mm/ (the URL is customisable). Once part of the group, members can then upload their own photographs to the 'Group Pool'.

Easy!

I have then used FlickrSlidr, a simple 3rd party tool to embed a slideshow of the images into my Moodle area. All in all, it took me about 45 minutes, and that included researching the different aspects of Flickr as I'm not really a power user! Take a look at the slideshow below - bare in mind it's only just been created, so will hopefully start to develop over the next few weeks.



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I mentioned the Creative Commons licenses above - they are gaining increasing attention with the significant investment into Open Education Resources across the sector (but that's a separate post). I took a short time in class to introduce the concept of Creative Commons to students, and encouraged students to make the Creative Commons Attribution license the default for photographs they upload to Flickr (can be applied from their account preferences). This means they can be searched for from Flickr's dedicated Commons pages, and can be reused by anyone, as long as they attribute the original author.

I'm happy for other staff/students to join the group and participate in building or reusing the images we generate, and of course if you're interested in implementing this yourself, I'm happy to lend a hand.

Are you doing anything interesting related to sharing images or any other works amongst students? If so, leave a comment.


This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.