Dean's presentation can be found here ...
Dean's ice-breaker activity was to ask us to form groups of 3/4 and to take turns in telling a story, using a random display of images to prompt us! The stories became more and more ridiculous but the activity was hilarious ... and noisy!
We process images 60,000 faster than we process text but Dean posed the question ... "Are we text snobs? Is material delivered in text format a more sophisticated form of learning?" After all, images can be more powerful and emotive. [Discussions on Dean's blog.]
Why do people need to capture an image, particularly when that image is readily available around the world? Is it for 'ownership', 'personalising the experience' etc? We can take as many photos as we like ... and simply discard any that we don't want! We live with cheap failure nowadays!
How can we we teach our students to 'view' and 'present'?
We can use media more readily than ever before and we can use other people's photos. There are circa 4 billion photos on Flickr, 150 million of which have been uploaded under a Creative Commons licence. It is often advisable to search for images on Flickr than via Google, where a lot of the images yield are not always free to use.
A good website to search images available under a Creative Commons licence is Compfight
When people upload their photos now, they tend to use more and more tags to describe their photos - this would seem to be a better system than using folders. Tags are mostly personal, but they should also reflect a public circumstance too. [A good activity for students is to ask them what tags they might attach to images - take a look at Google Image Labeller.]
Dean suggests taking a photo every day ... if nothing else, you will be helping to tell the story of life. And research applications on the web that enable you to add special effects, for example, tilt shifting . Two other applications worth investigating for editing images and adding special effects are Picnik and BigHugeLabs
Voicethread is a good way to allow others to talk about images and other media.
if you're about to buy a camera, then look at the pictures it takes ... don't just consider the price! Flickr's camera site might help.
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