Week 3, Thing #5, #6, #7

Flickr is lots of fun! I have actually used several different photo sharing sites in the past since all of my family and many of my friends live out of state, and they don't get to see my family on a regular basis. I have received photos from Flickr, but I haven't uploaded pictures to Flickr before today. I thought it was easy, and I created a set of pictures of my 15 month old son. I didn't upload this picture of my son directly from Flickr because of filtering issues, but I am assuming it is an user-friendly as the rest of the site.

What I like about Flickr are all the 3rd party mashups and services that people are creating. How neat! I created a Warhol-like mosaic of my son on Warholizer and a six sided cube of my favorite pictures on another "toy" offered by a third party site. Most of them offer the basic service for free, and you can get enhanced services for a fee. The amount of things you can do on your own with pictures is completely amazing. I remember being on the yearbook staff in high school, and we had to work very hard to accomplish special effects. We had to take hundreds of photos to get a "good one," and we wouldn't discover that it was good until a week after we took it because we had to get it developed or develop it ourselves! Digital cameras have really changed photography in a major way.

When I was growing up, I always wondered what would be the big invention of my lifetime. For my grandparents it was transportation and for my great-grandparents it was electricity. I truly believe that computer, digital, wireless (etc.) technology will be mine. In the last 10-15 years, we have been inundated by the amount of information at our fingertips. We can communicate messages, photos, and videos in an instant...and I LOVE it. I love teaching our students about it, and I love learning about it from them.