Unit 5 - ED 668c

This PBL was an interesting endeavor for my partner and I. When I first read the assignment, I thought we were creating an annotated slide show, and when I re-read the assignment, I realized we were creating an annotated photo essay. I had never created a photo essay before, so I hope we did it right! The annotations portion was a neat aspect of Flickr, and one that was well explained in the Richardson text. Annotating the photos was simple enough. I wasn’t sure if it was best to use creative commons photos or to take our own, so we stayed on the safe side. Rosemary’s school is very close to center city, so she was able to get some great shots. I found some interesting facts about the different sites she shot and incorporated those into the annotations, sort of like a pop-up video of the pictures. Flickr was a little different for me and I don’t know if it will be my photo sharing site of choice in the future. When I added the annotations, the boxes and annotations would only appear when you clicked on the picture so that it was the only one you saw. Similarly, when I entered the pictures into a slideshow, the annotations weren’t viewable when viewing the pictures in that format. I grew somewhat frustrated with this, because at the time, I thought I was creating an annotated photo slide show. When I viewed the pictures in the slide show format, they were very small and centered near the top. Since I didn’t upload these pictures myself, I wasn’t sure of the reason for this, but I did try to enlarge them in adobe photo shop, but then they were very blurry. If I had uploaded the pictures from my camera, I might have had more success with the size of the photos and the details included. Again, when I looked back at the assignment directions, I realized it was intended to be a photo essay. Then, I looked up information about photo essays and found some examples out on the web. The examples themselves were varied in format as well, so I went with my gut on this one, and again, I hope it was a good gut feeling. I added annotations in a trivia type of format. For example, each one started with “Did you know…”. My partner had added some details to the notes of each photo as well. I understand that the whole point of problem based learning is to try things out and experience the process of solving a problem, and I definitely felt like I did that! What I could not figure out how to do seamlessly was cite the information I found and add a works cited to a Flickr photo essay, so Ken and anyone who’s reading this – if you’d like to know where I got some of that information, you can feel free to email me, because I certainly wouldn’t want to not attribute those sources. Overall, the assignment was very good for me to play with Flickr’s capabilities and learn more about this application. You can check out the final product here: Flickr Philadelphia Photo Essay