I still don't know what a learning object really is, but since I've gotten back from vacation, I think I have created one, albeit not well suited to its format.
The last two conferences I have made presentations at, MADLaT and eLit, have involved more people from the ed tech world than librarians, so there has been a lot of discussion about learning objects. Combine this with a cluster of posts from Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman and Alan Levine about creating learning objects using Flickr and a problem I encountered with a patron yesterday that I needed to tell other staff about, and I was all set to create my first image mosaic LO.
My initial reaction to the end result was that screenshots should not be used to create a mosaic. They communicate absolutely nothing because of the very small size of each image (as you can see below), even if you click on the image, go to Flickr and mouse over the hotspot notes I have attached to the individual images.
But I wanted to document how I created this mosaic in case anyone else can come up with a better Flickr use of them than I did. Or wants to make a mosaic for some other purpose
It is easy to figure out how to use Flickr to add hotspots to an image, but when I wanted to create a chronological mosaic, I was stumped as to how to do it. This what I came up with.
1. Used Flickr Uploadr to upload a set of screenshots I had already captured. (That's another story.)
2. Took the relevant images and used the Organizr to create a set.
3. Used this website to create a mosaic image by giving it the url of my set of images.
http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/mosaic.php
I'm sure if I knew more about photo editing, I could do this myself, but this was a fairly functional and fun solution.
However I had to have the mosaic created several times before I got the arrangment and size of picture I wanted. There were a few hiccups.
Having done all that work, I can probably think of better subjects and "ingredients" for a mosaic, and I can probably also think of better sources (other than mosaics) for composite images to add Flickr hotspots to. But it was fun.
Posted by cminor at July 6, 2005 12:10 AM | TrackBack