Coming Of Age: An Introduction To The NEW Worldwide Web
Good practice guide Before closing this article, a few words of caution about using Flickr, some of which apply generally. 1. It's good practice to tag photos, and discussing with children the most appropriate words and phrases to use is a worthwhile exercise. Part of the information & communication technology (ICT) curriculum in the UK is concerned with finding things out, so pupils need to know that the use of appropriate tags makes this process a whole lot easier. 2. You will need to exercise the same sort of attention to what pupils search for as you would for any internet search. Although I haven't found anything explicitly pornographic on Flickr, there are pictures with ample amounts of flesh on display. I'm not sure if they would be blocked by an ordinary filtering system. Clicking on a link to Yahoo image searching resulted in my being transferred to Yahoo with the safe searching option on by default. 3. Remember that people own the copyright in their pictures, so you can't use them without permission. Flickr makes available 6 different kinds of copyright licence and explains what each one means in terms of what people can do with the photos. It might not be a bad idea to put a summary of these on your classroom wall or on the school intranet or home page. Children should be encouraged to check to see what, if any, licence has been assigned to the photos they wish to use – and to ask the owner's permission if none has been assigned (or ask you to do that for them, to prevent their identity being revealed). By the same token, you should decide what rights you're going to assign to the class photos you upload to Flickr – what a great opportunity for a class discussion followed by a democratic decision! 4. You can't take pictures of people and post them on the web without their permission – at least, that's the position in the UK. You will also, obviously, need to ensure that photos of children are not published without their parents' permission, and to make sure that the children cannot be identified individually: see the UK's Information Commissioner's advice on taking photographs in schools: http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk/cms/DocumentUploads/taking%20p hotographs%20in%20schools.pdf. 5. I'd also recommend going a step further and not taking photos that easily identify businesses or which feature car registration or other identifying details. Perhaps I'm being unduly cautious, but it seems to me that we should at least be encouraging pupils to consider the rights of other people. I for one would certainly not like my car or house details plastered all over the internet, and would feel pretty aggrieved if I discovered that someone had done so. But notwithstanding those few caveats, digital photography is a great way of creating clip art, and for making the environment come alive and helping children to seen new things – or new aspects of old things. And Flickr (and similar tools) help take it all a step further by encouraging and facilitating the cross-fertilisation of ideas, and collaboration. That has to be a good thing! This article was first published on the http://www.ictineducation.org website on 7 August 2005.
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