Saturday at the office. Cindy is out of town. Time for a “project”.
This morning while browsing LifeHacker, I read a description of a flickr tool called 1001. 1001 is a Mac only application that performs several tasks in conjunction with flickr. The one task that seemed kind of interesting was the monitoring of flickr to identify new uploads fitting user defined characteristics. This capability seemed like it might have possible classroom implications so I thought I would give it a try.
I created three streams – democrats (today is primary day in S. Carolina), North Dakota (just to see if anything is happening), and trld (Cindy is presently attending a conference titled Teaching, Reading and Learning Difficulties). I then entered tags associated with each stream (e.g., democrats – obama, clinton, edwards). Every 15 minutes (the setting I am using), 1001 scans flickr for new images relevant to my streams. See image below for the images/links from the democrats stream located in a little over an hour.
There must be some interesting things you could do with this tool in a classroom setting. Wouldn’t it be cool to leave the 1001 tool open on an interactive whote board. The most obvious application would be to set up streams associated with topics being discussed (especially if the topic is associated with an active issue) and see what pops up. I wonder if frequency of flickr images predicts election outcomes?
BTW – I know you are curious about the North Dakota stream. Did the 12 people in North Dakota with digital cameras take any pictures today? Absolutely – there were several very nice images. 😉
