2. What kinds of social sites on the Internet do NOT need trust systems in place to be successful? (e.g., the Six Degrees of Reputation site mentions user reviews on drug sites. Shouldn't doctors be handling things like that?)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Reputation and trust questions
1. Could reputation and rating systems be integrated more visibly into Wikipedia to improve the trustworthiness of the site?
Monday, March 23, 2009
March 23, 2009 questions
1. In Appreciating the Invisible (Efimova, 2004), the author argues that there are many less-tangible products knowledge development, including process learning, learning through lurking, informal learning, and time spent building personal networks. Do these variables simply need to be recognized, or should they be actively facilitated in organizations in order to maximize productivity and group dynamics?
2. In A Day Without Facebook, the author(s) make multiple flawed arguments for why Facebook shouldn't support a news feed feature. One prominent argument is that the news feed erodes the little bit of privacy that's left on Facebook. The news feed simply aggregates information that friends can already see by manually clicking through profiles. Why do people feel like they have lost their privacy if the information being aggregated is already public?
Monday, March 9, 2009
Questions for March 9, 2009
Here are my discussion questions for the 3/9/2009 class on friendships and relationships.
1) The Cummings (2002) paper does extensive comparisons of e-mail to both phone calls and face-to-face communications. Phone calls and face-to-face communications are both synchronous in nature, while e-mail is asynchronous, making the comparison of quality of communication in this paper somewhat unfair. How would the communications quality of online chat compare to phone and face-to-face interactions?
2) The Tyler (2002) paper discusses that it's important to understand what elements of interaction have the impact of being satisfying communication for participants. Is the answer to this question general (biological), or would this differ from person to person depending on their individual personalities?
Monday, March 2, 2009
Week 7 questions
Both of these questions are inspired by The Online Disinhibition Effect article (Suler, 2004).
1. What would a virtual classroom where students are anonymous look like? How would/could it function?
2. Can effective, assessable education be conducted in a truly asynchronous manner online?
Showcase: Photo Sharing Sites
Introduction
Every time a new technology is developed, the opportunity to incorporate it into educational learning environments. The Internet has gifted the world with a large number of websites designed to share photos in a variety of ways, some of which have educational uses. This post intended for technologists discusses possible uses for photo sharing sites in the K-12 classroom, compares a selection of the major photo-sharing websites, and provides links to a number of smaller sites.
Why Share Photos?
Photos have a variety of applications, both in and out of the classroom. In the classroom, teachers can share photos relevant to current lessons, do slideshows, and make photos available for use by students in their projects. Students can post comments about photos, or create photo portfolios of their work. Outside of the classroom, schools can distribute photos of school events within the school, and students can find photos for use in their homework.
Features of Photo Sharing Sites
This section describes a number of major photo-sharing sites that fall into three categories of specialization: sites geared toward ordering prints, sites geared toward blogging, sites geared toward linking and downloading, and sites geared toward search. Each type of site has different advantages and disadvantages, depending on the intended classroom application. In this comparison, features and limitations will be discussed, including:
Cost. All sites reviewed are "free," but most have the option of purchasing upgraded features or products, not all of which have direct relevance to educational settings. Some sites are supported by advertisements, which can present a problem in some school settings because the teacher does not have full control over the content displayed on the screen.
Registration. Most sites reviewed allow you to view public pictures without registration, but uploading pictures typically requires an account. Teachers wanting password-protected groups will need to have students establish accounts.
Uploading and Photo Management. All sites reviewed allow uploading of photos through a web interface, and some allow the use of custom applications or photo software plugins. Once uploaded, many (but not all) sites support albums, captions, and tagging to some degree. Sites have a variety of storage and bandwidth limitations, from unlimited to 50 MB/album.
Sharing and Privacy. The sites reviewed support a wide variety of sharing and privacy policies, which can be particularly important if using photos that contain sensitive information (such as pictures of kids at school).
Editing. Some sites feature web-based photo editing tools, which can be much more accessible than more complex programs like Photoshop.
Geo-tagging. Some sites support this feature, which allows photos to be tagged with a geographic location on a map where they were taken, which opens the doors for a wide variety of educational applications.
Comments. Most sites allow users to post comments about photos, which can in turn promote class discussion in a virtual forum.
Photo Sharing Sites, Compared
The first two sites compared, Flickr and Picasa, are geared toward blogging but can be used in many other contexts.
Flickr. This free ad-supported site owned by Yahoo supports uploading through the web, a standalone application, photo software plugins, or by e-mail. Photos can be tagged and organized into sets, which can then be grouped into collections within the 100 MB/month bandwidth limit for free accounts. The sharing features are varied, including the ability to link to photos, create groups of Flickr users who can post in a private shared space, a "safe search" feature to filter out adult content, a slideshow feature, and RSS feeds for subscribing to collections of photos. Privacy settings allow full control over photo access. Basic photo editing can be done in Flickr's web interface, as can geotagging. Users can also post comments about individual photos.
Picasa. This free site owned by Google supports uploading through the web, a standalone application, photo software plugins, or by e-mail. Photos can be captioned, tagged, and organized into albums up to the 1 GB storage limit for each user. The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos, photo searching, and a slideshow feature. Privacy settings allow full control over both albums and searches. Photo editing cannot be done on Picasa's website, but can be done with a free standalone application. Geotagging and user comments are also supported.
The next group of photo sharing sites are geared primarily toward storage and ordering of prints. These may be useful in some educational contexts, and can provide an inexpensive way to print photos for educational applications.
Kodak Gallery. This free site owned by Kodak supports uploading through the web and through a standalone application. Photos can be tagged and organized into albums of unlimited size, as long as one item on the site (e.g., a print) is purchased every 12 months. The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos and the creation of photo sharing user groups. This site does not support searches, enhancing the album-level privacy controls also in place. Web-based photo editing is also supported. Geotagging is not supported, but users can post comments about photos.
Shutterfly. This free ad-supported site linked to Target supports uploading through the web and through photo software plugins. Photos can be captioned and organized into albums of unlimited size. The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos, a search feature, photo slideshows, and RSS feeds to watch for changes in photo albums. Privacy settings can be configured at an individual photo level, and photo editing can be done with a standalone appication. Geotagging is not supported, but users can post comments about photos.
Snapfish. This free site owned by HP supports uploading through the web, through a stand-alone application, and through e-mail. Photos can be tagged, captioned, and organized into albums of unlimited size. The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos, photo slideshows, and private photo sharing groups. Privacy settings can be configured at an album level, and photo editing can be done directly on the website. Geotagging is not supported, but users can post comments about photos.
The last two sites, PhotoBucket and Picupine, are geared toward searching for and linking to photos, respectively.
PhotoBucket. This free ad-supported site supports uploading through the web, a standalone application, and photo software plugins. Photos can be captioned, tagged, and organized into albums and subalbums of up to the 1 GB storage limit for each user (and within the 25 GB/month bandwidth limit). The sharing features are flexible, allowing linking to individual photos, photo searching, a slideshow feature, group photo sharing, and RSS feeds for monitoring changes to albums. Privacy settings control access to photos at a per-album level. Photo editing can be done directly on the site. Geotagging is not supported, but users can post comments about photos. The biggest advantage of this site is in finding photos others have posted using its excellent search engine and large database of photos.
Picupine. This free site is minimal in its interface compared with the other sites reviewed, but is very powerful for a limited set of uses. It allows no account registration and only supports web uploading to single albums of up to 50 MB. Once the album is created, a link is provided that can be sent to anyone. The album will automatically expire and be deleted after a week. No search is provided, nor are privacy settings. No geotagging is supported, or user comments. This is an excellent way to distribute photos that are too big to send via e-mail.
Conclusions
Many photo sharing sites exist, and each supports a wide variety of features. In my opinion, Picasa and Flickr provide the most flexibility for a wide variety of photo sharing applications, and are technologically more advanced than many of the other options (particularly in their privacy controls). Picupine is also a personal favorite of mine, and has a distinct use for submitting photos for assignments.
Photo Sharing Sites, Unplugged.
Additional photo sharing sites not reviewed include:
AOL Pictures, atpic, BubbleShare, DropShots, Fotki, ImageShack, ipernity, MobileMe, MyPhotoAlbum, MyPictureTown, Panoramio, PBase, Phanfare, Slide, SmugMug, TinyPic, WebShots, Woophy, and Zooomr.
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