I cobbled together a small collection of images and set about analyzing them. You can see an example from the module here.
As you can see, Flickr offers several features which make it an extremely attractive educational tool. First, the note-taking tool permits the teacher to quickly create example images, guiding their students through the process of analyzing visual material. The comments section below the image space functions as a blog. Students can interact with each other (as well as the instructor) outside the classroom, yet still in a relatively controlled environment. Finally, images and sets of images can be marked as “private”, and access can be restricted only to members of the class. This not only has the effect of maintaining class privacy, but also potentially opens up the possibility of using images without the copyright worries, a problem any instructor creating web-based learning modules must consider.
