Life in the Network

This my study at home, where I do most of the teaching for this class. If you click the image, it’ll take you to my flickr account, where you’ll see that I’'ve used the ‘notes’ function to add a lot of information to the photo. It’s also part of a larger set that I made for a colleague who is doing research on the ways people set up and use their personal workspaces. (If you’re interested in participating, click here.) I also use flickr sets to teach how-to presentations and direction writing in my technical communication courses. Here’s one in progress on how to make guacamole. These are just a few of the things you can do with flickr.

Dale made a very good point about flickr and intellectual property. Applications like this one do make it easier to steal other people’s photographs, and that’s a very legitimate concern. However, there’s also a sizable community that uses flickr because they believe in contributing photos to a central image pool. This is why flickr allows you to choose copyright licenses for your photos. The default setting gives you full copyright protection, and they have procedures in place to report copyright violations. (As Dale points out, this isn’t an effective deterrent for everyone.) If you’re an open access / intellectual commons advocate, you can also choose a Creative Commons license to make it clear that it’s OK for people to use your photos as long as they don’t make any money, as long as they give you attribution, or a number of other constraints. We’ll be talking about this in detail later in the course, but I wanted to point this out now since the subject came up.

[BTW, you shouldn’t be using this post as a model for yours. Yours should be primarily about the reading. Dale’s and Julia’s are both good examples.]