Capturing student creativity: using social network in photographic education

Web 2.0 technology has changed the way the 21st century student thinks, learns and engages educationally and socially. The social presence afforded by Web 2 technologies embraces social interaction, collaboration, learning through sharing, exchanging ideas and production of knowledge allowing integrated life-long learning experience, (O'Reilly, 2005). Taking into account the digital age, the digitally savvy student and the digital camera it was necessary to find a resolution to teaching traditional photography skills within this new environment. Flickr was chosen as the social network that would best suit photographic education. This paper will discuss the implementation of Flickr into an existing photographic program. Visually well laid out with a simple interface, flickr's physical characteristics enable the establishment of improved visual literacy, access to technical metadata, immediate feedback, collaboration between all participants and an anywhere anytime capability.