Road Trip ’11
Road Trip ’11, a set on Flickr.
Road trip from New York to Arizona
Road Trip ’11, a set on Flickr.
Road trip from New York to Arizona
The group teaching Geo-Location shed some light on services such as FourSquare and Gowalla. Before the class I have used FourSquare, but had only heard of Gowalla, never used it. The assignment for Gowalla was fun, planning a trip with ten stops along the way was somewhat challenging, so I did a mock of the trip I am taking after graduation.
An app like FourSquare is incredibly useful for businesses, sure people like to use it for fun, but what they don’t realize is that they are promoting and publicizing companies and businesses that they “check-in” at. This could be very useful for a business because if the business partners with FourSquare, they can have alerts sent to FourSquare users as they pass the store, restaurant, etc. that will alert them of deals and incentives to come into their business.
As far as personal use goes I do not like to use these services because I always forget to check in and I don’t know anyone else that uses them so it is sort of useless for me personally, however I do see many practical uses both personally as well as professionally.
My group for the FYE project has been creating a Wiki page that will serve as a place for FYE students to learn about as well as share their knowledge of the Alfred University campus and the surrounding community of Alfred, NY. There will be assignments attached to this Wiki page that students will be required to complete. These assignments will have to do with the University and the community. There will also be a Facebook group page linked to the Wiki for students to receive news and other information.
I do not want to give away too much before we present this to the FYE committee on Wednesday 🙂
For the Comm 200 second co-teaching presentation my group taught photo sharing to the class. The main focus of the presentation was on Flickr, as it is incredibly useful and versatile when it comes to sharing photos. However, it is not just for sharing photos, there are so many ways to apply Flickr into other works or projects.
With Flickr you can upload a photo or a video up to 90 seconds in length. Once uploaded you can easily add tags, a title, a description, and add it to one of your sets. A set is literally just a set of photos that you like to group together based upon something they all have in common, such as an event, a place, or just a theme. Once the photo is tagged, titled, and placed in a set you can use an online application called Picnik that allows users to upload a photo and edit it on the Picnik site. Picnik is partnered with Flickr, so you don’t even have to leave your Flickr page to do this, it is an option in the “actions” drop down menu. Flickr also allows you to share your photos via email, Facebook, or your personal blog.
In addition to all of the aesthetic and naming you can do with a photo, Flickr allows users to Geo-tag their photos. Geo-tagging is essentially when you locate on a map where the photo was taken, and that location becomes linked to the photo. This is where Flickr becomes a great tool outside of photo sharing. For example, in our co-teaching assignment that we gave to the class we asked the class to get into their groups from a different project. At which point we used their topic from the other project and had them go out into the town and find the locations we assigned each group. The students had to find the location, take a photograph, upload it to Flickr, name it, describe it, and Geo-tag it. However, the catch was, we did not tell them where exactly to go, we gave them clues, and they had to decide which location we were talking about.
Outside of a class project this has potential to help out with numerous types of projects. Say a city’s parks department is looking to raise awareness or host a clean-up event of some sort, this would allow them to go out ahead of time, take the photos and Geo-tag them. This provides those who they send the Flickr link to the ability to see the parks amenities and where certain parts are; or for the clean-up it allows them to show what needs to be done, giving volunteers the opportunity to offer their services in the areas best suited for them.
Overall, Flickr is a very useful tool that is both fun and productive.
For the Comm 200 Co-Teaching assignment I have been working on and preparing to teach social notesharing. Specifically, the service I have been using most and have a great understanding of is Springpad. Springpad is a service that allows users to save almost any information that they want to remember.
Say you are on a website, and want to save the page, and wish to access it from any computer, not with just a bookmark on your personal computer. You can simply go to the Springpad website and paste the link into a new item in one of your notebooks. Notebooks work like a physical notebook would, they allow you to categorize your information making it easier to find later. There is also an extension for most of the major web browsers that allows you to “clip the page” which adds it to whichever notebook you choose.
However, Springpad is not only for saving webpages, while on the site you can search for anything you want to remember or have for later, and save it. For example, if you search “chocolate cake recipe,” a list of recipes will appear, with the most popular being at the top. Once you have found one you like and save it to a notebook, when you view the recipe it will show the entire recipe, not just a link to the original destination.
In addition to being able to save and categorize things like recipes, webpages, products, movies, music, etc. you can tag your saved things so that all of your related items are saved together and can be easily accessed using the list of tags on the left side of the page.
You can also find friends that share similar interests as you and share your saved things with them or with anyone by making it public. There is also the option to find friends through Facebook, your Gmail contacts, or Yahoo! contacts. In addition to finding contacts, you can share your saved things through Facebook, Twitter, Diigo, and over 300 other services.
Springpad is available on any computer on the internet, or on any iOS device, and on Android devices.
Here is a link to a short YouTube Video about Springpad.