Objective 10 - Making Meaning Out of Mashups

It is sad, but true, that I did not understand the concept “mashup” prior to completing Thing 10. I have played with many of the Flickr toys in Big Huge Labs in the past as well as Spell with Flickr, but I did not understand these were mashups. One can easily get trapped in these two sites playing with photos (at least I did). I envision students using some of these tools to really spice up some of their projects. I discovered applications that I emailed to friends and I was able to sketch out some future gift ideas for family members. I thought that Flickr Color Pickr and some of the items in Flickrbits.com were interesting, but I could not see a use for them. In exploring the non-Flickr related mashups I found the similar results. Taking up the challenge to find my own mashup, I discovered Obamiconme. This site allows users to make images in the style of Shepard Fairey's iconic "Hope" poster.

Here are samples of my mashups:

Spell with Flickr

Big Huge Labs

Dumpr

Flickr Color Pickr

Obamiconme

Objective 9 - Fun with Flickr

Creating a Flickr account and uploading pictures was so easy! Uploading my personal pictures to Flickr may be an obsession for me. The Common Craft video outlined one of my worries for our family pictures. Until my son was sevenish we took pictures the “old way”. I have eight albums full of pictures of him and then we went digital, every couple of years upgrading our cameras. Now everyone in the family has a digital camera and there are never limits on the number of pictures we take for any and every occasion. We have traveled to some amazing places and taken some great photos – all of which are stored on my external hard drive. We have not shared these and rarely look through them – what a shame! On my list of things to do is to scan the printed pictures so all photos are digital. Uploading to a site like Flickr can be part two of this task.

Both Compfight and Morguefile are excellent places to locate pictures for classroom presentations. These are also great places to direct students who are looking for images. So many times students simply go to Google Images. There are other choices; we simply need to share this with them.