Category: Web 2.0

How do I know that all of this was real? The dark side of being a digital stranger in an online learning environment – Part 2

Introduction

In part 1 I started to explore some of the darker aspects of online engagement, particularly the process of disinhibition, which can be facilitated by the anonymity, fantasy, openness and freedom that engaging online affords.  In this post, I want to take that analysis a little further and perhaps a little deeper into our practices as both digital citizens and academics.  More specifically, I am going to unpack some of the notions around authenticity and realness.   Lying at the heart of an educational experience is the ability to understand why something is authentic or real.  Without that, we are left with a bunch of words sans context.  Repeated, spoken but not contextualised or understood.  Remembered, resourced but without meaning or resonance.

 

The use of e-learning as an instrument of replication and repetition is a theme I have explored in a number of earlier blog posts.  The concept of the digital stranger throws a specific light on why using web 2.0 platforms and social media specifically as didactic, broadcast-led instruments firstly may isolate learners who have been moved significant components of their interactions and relationships to an on-line environment and secondly miss an opportunity to explore different modes of authenticity and realness, facilitated by a learners disinhibited to varying degrees, being interactive and collaborative.

 

What makes engaging on-line different from a face to face meeting or a class?  Is there something that emerges from these apparently dark processes of identity, interaction and sharing online that doesn’t occur when we are in the same room or lecture theatre?  Are we even comparing apples with apples?  Perhaps we are talking about two separate iterations of the very same thing – learning.  The evolution of social media and its increasingly ubiquitous use by people who chose to live some or all of their lives online do not simply represent the transition of conversations and relationships to a new platform, like moving from one coffee shop to another.  These relationships can be very, very different, drawing on a portfolio of skills that have emerged and aggregated through social media platforms.

 

Aside from the aspects of online engagement such as anonymity and asynchronous communications that I looked at in part 1, on-line relationships can be collaborative and open, where content sharing, appropriation and creation are a daily function of the interaction.  Before Facebook, would you send a memo to all your friends giving them a status update?  Before Flickr, the only way we had to share photos was the dreaded slide night (I am still trying to get the memory of bad fondue and Blue Nun out of my traumatised brain.)  The difference is more than the mode of transmission.  Let’s take Flickr as an example.  It affords the opportunity, if provided by the creator, to re-use photos, not just from people we know, but complete (digital) strangers.  It provides us with a chance to comment, which can then become conversation which evolves into a relationship.  It then allows us to meet other people who liked the photo or the subject of the photo, as part of a wider group.  Finally, it can provide for learning through the application of critical comment, expertise sharing and collaboration.  Now, think about your own discipline in this context.  A class of learners engaged not just in consuming material provided to them by academics, but re-purposing them, sharing them with others, making network and connections that facilitate interaction and social construction of knowledge and participating in learner-led and facilitated learning.

 

However, the purpose of this blog post is not to proletize the use of social media in higher education.  There are enough advocates out there doing that without me and my size 12s.  No, I think there is a more fundamental lesson here for education.  As academics designing and facilitating programmes there is a challenge about how much we need to engage with these new relationships.  Do we keep designing learning, teaching and assessment in the same way we always have, just using web 2.0 platforms in very web 1.0 ways?  Is there something more to be gained from identifying and understanding the changing ways in which interaction is occurring?  Should we experience more, become part of networks and communities ourselves as a way of applying and repurposing those experiences to next contexts?

 

I have been actively engaged online for nearly 17 years from bulletin boards, to IRC and now onto any number of social media platforms.  It has been a continual cycle of experience and appropriation and evaluation.  Most of it has been enjoyable and satisfying.  Some of it has been painful, traumatic and cathartic.  There have been moments of inspiration, of creativity and of disappointment and body shaking laughter.  I have made friends, partners, enemies and colleagues.   That lived life informs how I design and develop a programme especially where there is some blended or online component.  I am also 42.  I am cogniscent of the fact that modes of interactivity are neither uniform nor agreed across all users, and that there are significant differences between age groups, context of usage and device preference. But I am also aware that many of my own experiences would not have happened in real life.  It took both the emancipatory and the disinhibiting nature of social media to facilitate much of those experiences.  In part 1, I looked at three of John Suler’s considerations for what he termed the ‘online disinhibition effect’, a way of understanding some of the darker aspects of online interaction.  In part 2, I would like to explore three more; invisibility, dissociative imagination and minimisation of status and authority.

 

Invisibility

The absence of visual cues like tone of voice and body language can lower the inhibition of online learners.  Suler notes;

 

‘People don’t have to worry about how they look or sound when they type a message. They don’t have to worry about how others look or sound in response to what they say. Seeing a frown, a shaking head, a sigh, a bored expression, and many other subtle and not so subtle signs of disapproval or indifference can inhibit what people are willing to express.’ (Suler 2004)

 

The fact that you can’t see the person you are engaging means the bounds of physical appearance are no longer present.  Some writers (Stephens, Young and Calabrese 2007) argue that it increases the opportunity for cheating behavior in learners (necessitating a different kind of assessment, one that relies on understanding and application, not repetition and memory).  Invisibility also engenders lurking and trolling behaviors  both in many ways anti-social and counter to the participatory aims of most online programmes.  The cloak of invisibility also impacts on those facilitating the programme as they cannot identify the visual cues of the lurkers, identify the motivations of the trolls or even see who they are actually interacting with.  Equally, invisibility may afford the user with the sense of braggadocio that comes from not being seen or known, and which may hide a lack of understanding or a deliberate or accidental misreading of the learning.   More widely, this can manifest itself in fantasy and role playing, gender swapping and increasingly complex scenario building that works simply because the user is effectively invisible, relying on text and images completely in their control.   What happens in an online environment when some or all of what someone says turn out to be untrue or a misconstruction of the facts?   What does it say for trust, authenticity and realness?  How does it impact our processes of marking and feedback?

 

Dissociative Imagination

How much of online interaction is a game that we control when we log in and log off?  Dissociative imagination unlocks inhibition by pretending that what is happening is not real, that the interactions are akin to those that are simulated in a video game; that the emotions, impacts and personalities affected by your actions are not real, or at least not as real as real life.  And, that these actions are free from the responsibilities and consequences of real life interaction.  In terms of engagement in online learning, dissociative imagination can result in boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable interaction becoming blurred, learners not treating collaborative or group activities seriously because it’s only ‘online’, especially in the context of activities or formative assessment.  It is less the case in summative assessments as these have a defined impact on achievement.  Whilst this type of disinhibition is not limited to online learning and clearly occurs in many classroom based modes of group work especially, the ease with which it can occur online has considerable impact on social interaction, especially in large, disparate and potentially anonymous groups.

 

Minimisation of status and authority

As a guiding principle, most of the online programmes I have designed or been involved in developing have been put together with the intention that the role of the ‘teacher’ should be de-privileged.  Why should the articles we recommend become the basis for the literature used in all our assessments?  Why can’t learners find and share references through citation platforms or digital curation tools like Scoop.it?   Suler notes that;

‘The traditional Internet philosophy holds that everyone is an equal, that the purpose of the net is to share ideas and resources among peers. The net itself is designed with no centralized control, and as it grows, with seemingly no end to its potential for creating new environments, many of its inhabitants see themselves as innovative, independent-minded explorers and pioneers. This atmosphere and this philosophy contribute to the minimizing of authority.’ (Suler p.234)

 

In the context of adult learning, how do we reconcile the internet’s ability to support a democratic and emancipated environment (although within a wider context of access to infrastructure and bandwidth – the digital divide is a post for another day) with the central control that a university craves?  I would argue strongly for the need to support the development of ‘innovative, independent-minded explorers and pioneers’ both inside our community and our faculties and schools.  Arguably, whilst the deconstruction of authority poses many challenges, especially to ego and established practice, the potential it offers from programme design and assessment is exciting.

 

Conclusions

At the end of the day, as a person leading a programme, what I am really seeking?  Are retention and achievement the key measures of the success or failure of the programme to make learning happen? Without doubt they measure, at least obliquely, learner engagement and perhaps even more obliquely, learner satisfaction.  I called these two blog posts ‘How do I know that all of this was real?’  What matters most to me in the digital life I live, the digital scholarship I engage in and the relationships that I build and have fall is authenticity.  The experiences, whether they are with me or others hidden behind a disinhibited wall or showing their ‘real’ selves warts and all, should have something authentic about them  That could be a glimpse of a personality or trait kept well hid in real time or a full blown role play of character and emotional resonance.

 

The most powerful form of authenticity in terms of online learning manifests itself as creativity.  I see online learning as a magnet for creative activity, freeing learners from the some of the rules of society that inhibit creative thought.  There are risks attached to this at a curricular or learning level.  People can hurt in this environment; it can be traumatic, worrying, confusing and challenging.  Whilst it is essentially (although not always) a safe environment, it might provoke learners into thinking about why they are doing something or why they are being told something.  My observations from part 1 still stand however.  In the age of MOOCs and platform driven e-learning, fuelled by OERs and user engagement, there is a place for a new pedagogy, a new way of thinking about how we structure higher education.  It is a pedagogy that accesses the skills the learner already has and does not assume that they are a blank slate, ready to be moulded by own inputs as faculty ‘experts’.  It is a pedagogy that puts interaction and engagement at the centre of learning, teaching and assessment strategy.  It is a pedagogy that challenges the learners to make decisions about the authenticity or realness of what they are learning.   It asks learners to reuse, appropriate, create, design, share, collaborate and apply things.  It is a pedagogy that draws inspiration from the challenges presented by interaction as and with digital strangers.

 

In 2007 Marilyn Lombardi in a piece called ‘Authentic learning for the 21st century’ used the phrase ‘authentic learning’ to describe a learning-by-doing process, defining it thus;

‘Authentic learning typically focuses on real-world, complex problems and their solutions, using role-playing exercises, problem-based activities, case studies, and participation in virtual communities of practice. The learning environments are inherently multidisciplinary.  They are “not constructed in order to teach geometry or to teach philosophy. A learning  environment is similar to some ‘real world’ application or discipline: managing a city, building a house, flying an airplane, setting a budget, solving a crime, for example.” Going beyond content, authentic learning intentionally brings into play multiple disciplines, multiple perspectives, ways of working, habits of mind, and community. ‘   

 

The attraction of the space between disciplines is a strong one, and a lot of the literature around authentic learning supports the benefits of inter and trans-disciplinary learning.  Perhaps there is a need to think again about authentic learning as a way of shaping both the curriculum design and broader pedagogical principles of an institution, right down to programme or even modular level.  Drawing on some of the recommendations from these last two posts, maybe there is a need for authentic learning 2.0.  A topic for another blog post!

 

Keep the conversation going by posting comments, following my twitter feed @PeterBryantHE or just getting in contact  through the blog.

 

Lombardi, M. M. (2007). In D. G. Oblinger (Ed.), Authentic learning for the 21st century: An overview. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. http://alicechristie.org/classes/530/EduCause.pdf

Suler, John (2004). “The Online Disinhibition Effect”. CyberPsychology & Behavior 7 (3): 321–326.

http://www.samblackman.org/Articles/Suler.pdf

‘…it’s better to burn out than to fade away’ – has higher education reached a punk moment?

Making connections, keeping connections, growing connections; all of these processes are fundamental to human interaction and social co-operation.   In music, connections are the small pieces of scaffold that inspire and encourage people to create, share and perform art and songs that mean something to them and to their audiences.  Some call it rock family trees, some call lineage.  Whatever you choose to call it, the Beatles were inspired by the music coming out of the US in the late 50s and early 60s.  Punk rebelled against the music of the time and took their inspirations from the blues, the sounds of Detroit or simply from each other.   However, at each of the centre of each of these often seismic shifts in culture was an inherent tension between the fringe and the mainstream.  Soul music, that amazing combination of Rhythm and Blues that came pouring out of the Motor City took issue, both directly and obliquely, with segregation and the lack of civil rights for African Americans, breaking down barriers between white and black music.  Grunge emerged mainly from the cold, wet cities in the Pacific Northwest of the US, where teen angst, disenchantment, unemployment and a DIY spirit all fused together to forge a scene of bands that would burn out (and sometimes fade away), but change the face of popular music in a way that lasts today (indie music anyone?)

 

None of these movements were single bands (although there were leaders and figureheads).  None of these movements could have had the impact they did without connections, music made as a tribute to their heroes, people making more music after hearing it from their heroes, and people finding something in hearing this music on the radio, on record, in zines or from the friends on mix-tapes.  Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was heavily influenced by bands like the Pixies, in fact, Smells Like Teen Spirit was his attempt to fuse the quiet/loud dynamic of the Pixies to the heavy sounds he loved.

Now, I hear you ask, what does all of this have to do with Higher Education? I was recently putting together a paper for the University of Greenwich Learning and Teaching conference called ‘Start an information riot!’ which focuses on a case study of student-led learning and how the students on the BAPP (Arts) programme at Middlesex University, could make and share content in order to learn.  However, as I was trying to position this paper in the literature and my findings, a single question kept popping into my brain…’is higher education having a punk moment?’

‘…(learners) communicate in a language that many academics don’t yet understand. It’s an ever-evolving language of interpretation and expression, an interactive approach to learning, creating, and responding to information through a complex montage of images, sound, and communication. Students are pushing learning into a new dimension; it’s a mistake to continue to try to teach them in time-worn ways. (Brown 2001)

We could fill this whole blog with opinions around the origin of punk rock.  But let’s keep it simple.  Punk happened in the late 70s.  And for whatever reason, sometimes facilitated by the artists and other times by the fans, three, perhaps disconnected things, happened…

  1.  What went before punk was often vilified, demonised, mashed up, diminished or ignored

See Alan Medhurst who said… ‘Punk erupted into my life in the autumn of 1977…  Swathes of my existing record collection had to be disavowed, [but]…  it was OK to have three Van Der Graaf Generator albums because Johnny Rotten said he liked their singer, Peter Hammil’

2. What happened in the name of punk was often DIY, emancipatory, easy to access and consume and communal

 

3. What happened after faded away, burnt-out, got commercialised and then was vilified, demonised, mashed up, diminished or ignored by what came next

‘Punk degenerated from being a force for change, to becoming just another element in the grand media circus. Sold out, sanitised and strangled, punk had become just another social commodity, a burnt-out memory of how it might have been.’ Penny Rimbaud of Crass

I argue that e-learning has experienced these three things over its recent lifespan.  There is a claim made a number of intellectual theorists and futurists in higher education who argue that, at this time and at this juncture, technology will be the greatest instrument of change for higher education and that universities are facing the most significant challenges in their history as a result of the impact of technology on their learners and their way of learning (Brown 2001; Brown & Adler 2008; Garrison & Anderson 2003; Greenhow, Robelia & Hughes 2009; Kamenetz 2010; Keats & Schmidt 2007).  Yet, with all of this debate, research and dialogue, as Bascia and Hargreaves (2000) noted there is little evidence that wider, macro-level change arising directly or indirectly from technology and its impacts on pedagogy and learners has occurred within institutions.  There are thousands of individual projects, cross-institutional and even international looking at elements of the relationship between technology and higher education, but very little to suggest that e-learning and technology is the predominant pedagogical instrument in the modern university.  Why has this happened?

 

The clue is in what happened ‘after punk’.  The punk explosion pretty much died off after 1980 with the break-up of the Sex Pistols and the release of the Clash’s ‘London Calling’.  The movement splintered into a multitude of tiny shards; post punk, ska, new wave, dub, dance; all of which drew on punk and its own nascent influences.  Punk then influenced other, more popular movements like grunge and indie (for example).

 

E-learning has been experiencing the same deconstruction and fragmenting. We have stopped talking about the change in pedagogy that is required to adapt HE to the new wave of learners.  We have ceased thinking about what kind of attitudinal change needs to occur in faculty and community in order to effectively link technology to practice.  We are fighting smaller battles.  We are heralding new instruments, new platforms and new devices, for use in one classroom or with one group.  The growth of the VLE (such as Moodle or Blackboard) is a testament to this kind of thinking.  A VLE is defined by its role in the administration of University function and its ability to replicate the information dissemination and limited social interactions that often occur in our bricks and mortar classrooms.   The VLE is to the new pedagogy as the Sex Pistols and Crass are to Limp Bizkit and Korn – a poor imitation, popular, but empty of influence and lasting impact.

 

I believe that higher education has reached a punk moment, where what went before needs to be re-evaluated, re-thought, re-mixed, mashed up, re-purposed and redesigned for the next generation of learners and the community they will enter into.  The noted writer on fan culture, Dick Hebdige noted quite astutely that;

 

‘…in order to render a subculture non-threatening, it must be pulled into the mainstream and commodified’ (Hebdige 1979)

 

E-learning and technology in the modern university has become just that.  A VLE is eminently non-threatening, especially if we use it solely to hold the archive of our digital notes.  A podcast or a lecture capture is non-threatening if it’s just last year’s lectures uploaded without any consideration for the new medium or how it could be used.  YouTube is mainstream and commodified if it simply replaces those old VHS tapes we used to watch in class.  However, using all of this great data to argue for a fundamental change in the way we operate at the most base level, to argue for pedagogy 2.0 is far less safe.

 

Another small deviation into music history, if I can indulge you.  One of the small shards that speared off punk in the US landed in the Pacific Northwest (again).  As a response to the misogynistic, white, male punk rock scene that dominated the scene as punk was commercialised (‘early punk’ was far less male-centric with strong characters like Siouxsie Sioux, The Slits etc), a small group of female and male musicians coalesced together as the Riot Grrrl movement, a scene of bands from which third-wave feminism and female empowerment and expression came to the fore in lyrics, zines and other media (Rosenberg & Garafolo 1998; Schilt 2004)

‘BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US. We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy…BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don’t break the code of silence…BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed. BECAUSE a safe space needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit’ Erika Reinstein, Riot Grrrl NYC #2, 1992

 

Riot Grrrl amongst other movements kicked the commercialized sounds and attitudes in music fairly and squarely towards something new.  They might be brief flares of rebellion, burning out quickly, but they left connections to other artists and scenes that last today. Higher education is at a point where it needs something like riot grrrl to shake it up, emancipate people to think differently and say what they need to say.  E-learning and technology can be the instruments that bring about the largest change in higher education in living memory.  They will not be the change, nor will they be the catalysts of change.  As guitars and drums are the instruments of punk, web 2.0 and devices are simply the tools of the trade.  The DIY spirit, the anger and passion (the filth and the fury!) and the dedication to creation and creativity is what made punk happen, what pushed riot grrrl to reposition the role of women in music and what made Motown fight against racism in the US.

 

We need e-learning 2.0, a new pedagogy that embraces the significant changes in the skills of learners, that prepares graduates for employment in industries and jobs that are nothing like the generation before experienced, that utilizes the amazing ability of the internet to aggregate, share, collaborate and construct and that ensures that University is not a dinosaur in a world moving at pace that far exceeds the speed at which the institution has been able to change in the past.  In no way am I arguing that we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, nor I am advocating everything should be on-line, virtual and jacked-in.

 

Fritz: The printed page is obsolete. Information isn’t bound up any more. It’s an entity. The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive.

Ms. Calendar: Thank you, Fritz, for making us all sound like crazy people.

I Robot, You Jane – Buffy the Vampire Slayer

 

 

The modern University will not look the same as it does now.  The challenges and significant change that the digital age represents cannot afford to be reacted to by putting a new coat of paint on an old car.  The modern University will have to adapt a world that is looking for new ways to get from point A to point B, driven and navigated by learners and a community that are not necessarily constrained by roads or engines.  The challenge for the modern university is to make these changes on the larger scale; across the institution, through the entire provision and within a variety of linked or dislocated processes, so that they impact the very core of what it means to be a modern University in the digital age.

 

‘It is often very tempting first to draw a simplified picture of the role of the teacher in “traditional” or even “old-fashioned” education and then present contrasting visions of a new role in the future. In my opinion, there is too much easy and superficial talk about revolutions and paradigm shifts in education. Revolutions don’t happen that often… ‘  (Ljoså 1998)

 

If you are interested in this kind of debate, I am presenting a couple of papers at the University of Greenwich annual teaching and learning conference (Inspiring Teachers: learning and leading in academic practice) and the Academic Practice and Technology conference (Employer Engagement in a Digital Age) on the 3rd and 4th of July 2012.  Come along and join the debate.  As always, I would love to hear your opinions, ideas, views, angry ripostes or bouquets, just make a comment!

Also, I will shamelessly plug my Australian Music Podcast called Wide Open Road. It is based on this notion of connections, finding links between various eras of great Australian Indie music.  It will hopefully keep the dream alive so that the next wave of creativity can be influenced by what went before them, and it won’t all vanish into the quicksand of nostalgia.


 

References

Bascia, N. & Hargreaves, A. 2000, ‘Teaching and leading on the sharp edge of change’, in N. Bascia & A. Hargreaves (eds), The sharp edge of educational change, Routledge, London, pp. 3-28.

Brown, J.S. 2001, ‘Learning in the digital age’, The  Internet and the university: 2001 Forum, eds M. Devlin, R. Larson & J. Meyerson, EDUCAUSE, Boulder, CO, pp. 71-86.

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. 2008, ”Minds on fire’ : Open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0′, Educause review, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 16-20.

Garrison, D.R. & Anderson, T. 2003, E-learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice, Routledge.

Greenhow, C., Robelia, B. & Hughes, J.E. 2009, ‘Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship in a Digital Age’, Educational Researcher, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 246-59.

Hebdige, D. 1979, Subculture: The meaning of style, Methuen.

Kamenetz, A. 2010, DIY U: Edupunks, edupreneurs, and the coming transformation of higher education, Chelsea Green Publishing.

Keats, D. & Schmidt, J.P. 2007, ‘The genesis and emergence of Education 3.0 in higher education and its potential for Africa’, First Monday, vol. 12, no. 3.

Ljoså, E. 1998, ‘The role of university teachers in a digital era’, paper presented to the EDEN Conference, Bologna, Italy, 26th June <http://www1.nks.no/eurodl/shoen/eden98/ljoså/htm>.

Rosenberg, J. & Garafolo, G. 1998, ‘Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from within’, Signs, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 809-41.

Schilt, K. 2004, ‘”Riot Grrrl Is…”: The Contestation over Meaning in a Music Scene’, in A. Bennett & R.A. Peterson (eds), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville.

 

Making connections: Using your flickr more effectively to build networks

Flickr (and other photo sharing applications such as Facebook) are very interesting examples of web 2.0 interaction.  Pictures are quite emotive, interesting and personal, but can be equally creative, informative, descriptive or simply abstract. Web 2.0 is built on the concept of user generated content, where the people who populate and use the site are the people who make content.  Sure, we can discuss issues of copyright and ownership, which are important and shouldn’t be ignored in the way I am just about to!  But, what I would like to focus on with this post is the notion of connections, and the roles we play to facilitate and support the connection between audience and maker, between producer and consumer and between us and other people 

Flickr represents the simplest way to transition from being a consumer of culture to a producer of it (a process that has been called prosuming, where the same person can participate in the production and consumption of arts and culture, facilitated in part by the interactivity and engagement of web 2.0 technology- for more info see http://www.freepress.net/files/CommunityMedia_ProsumerEra.pdf, which is a great article written by Ellie Rennie).  We as a logged in user of Flickr can browse other peoples photos, we can search for images that have tagged or given a title, we can share those pictures with our friends or contacts, and in some cases we can use those pictures for our creative and generally non-profit purposes (note: some pictures have all rights reserved meaning, look but do not touch).  However, we can do something as a user.  We can upload our own creative content and allow others to consume it in the way we consume.  We can go back as many times as we want to the content we like, we can make certain pictures favourites, but equally other can become ‘fans’ of our work and do the same.    

So, how does flickr link creators and ‘fans’?  If you just upload your own photos on flickr, sharing them with others, tagging them with labels that help people find them and then letting your friends and colleagues know that the flickr photo stream is available and running, then flickr serves the same purpose as say Facebook in terms of photo sharing. flickr can offer the user/producer a lot more however.  It allows you to post your photos to albums of shared interest and content.  It allows you to comment on people’s photography, whether this is the image, the technique, the subject or simply to make contact and say what you think. After you have made contact with people through being in the same group, sharing their work or even having a conversation with them through commenting, you can make them your friend and share their new uploads.

A really interesting example of this occurred on a street art project from Sydney.  A mural artist decided to take an anti-burqa stance in a wall mural in Sydney last year.  An artist using her own artistic medium of posters responded to the work, which she then took a photo of and posted to flickr.  What resulted was a dialogue between users of flickr (including myself) about the controversy, the area the work was exhibited and the whole issue generally.  Blog content was linked and a conversation established between an artist and her ‘fans’. 

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/glendaglitagrrl/5329264335/

How did I spot this part of art from amongst the millions of photos?  It was a street art group that aggregates or collects photos of street art in a particular suburb in Sydney (where I used to love).  I comment regularly on other peoples pictures, whilst also adding pictures of my own (when I get to go home to take them!).  I spotted the picture of the work in the group’s photo album having been recently added.  Aside from the benefit of interacting with artists, I had an immediate and sustained interest in my photos, jumping from 10 views a day to 150 views a day.  

Like most web 2.0 applications, flickr relies on the sharing of user generated content, interaction between users and a commitment to maintain that contact, perhaps using mediums other than flickr (such as a twitter feed or through a blog) in order to be an effective tool of networking.  So, if people don’t engage by sharing content, commenting on content or aggregating their content in groups, then no-one will see the content.  If a tree falls…

So, search some groups that might be related to the pictures you have posted and post some of your photos to that group. Look at other peoples photos and make some comments on their work. Perhaps blog some of the groups you have found on flickr.  Here are some interesting flickr groups I just found that you might wish to have a look at, or share your photos on…

http://www.flickr.com/groups/londontheatrebreaks/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/stagestruck/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/practice/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/just_dance/

A final suggestion might be to embed your flickr photo stream into your blog. How you do this varies from blog site. However, there is a simple how-to guide located here http://www.flickr.com/help/blogging/

And to complete the circle, here is my flickr photstream, which you may find of interest.  Be warned, it does contain strong language and adult themes, and is not suited to people under the age of 18…street art can be a rude and politically charged medium to work in J