Flickering Flickr

In my field of Educational Technology, we sometimes talk about what actually makes a particular tech tool an "educational technology." Some tools are deliberately designed for teaching and learning; I'm thinking about educational software packages for example. Those of a certain age will remember games like "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" or "Number Munchers" or "Reader Rabbit"--all games ostensibly developed to help students learn particular educational content.

But what about a game like "SimCity" or "Civilization" or "Rollercoaster Tycoon?" These weren't really developed to be educational games...but as a games, they definitely have some capability for providing interesting learning opportunities for students. And so there is this tension about educational technologies: sometimes technologies developed for other purposes or contexts are co-opted into becoming educational technologies, because educators find interesting ways to use them for teaching and learning.

Because, if nothing else, great teachers are resourceful, and use the tools they have at their disposal...often in creative ways.

I've been thinking about Flickr as an educational technology for some time. Flickr is a photo-sharing site, one used by professionals and amateurs alike. Flicker has some good tools built in for sharing content (photos) with Creative Commons licenses as well, which is a great thing for teachers who are trying to get their students to only use materials with permission, and to properly attribute the works to the intellectual property holders. And so I was pretty excited when Flickr announced a few years ago that they were going to give anyone a terabyte (that's 1000 gigabytes, or 1,000,000 megabytes) of storage space for free. That's a lot of storage space! And a lot of people--myself included--started uploading a lot of photos there, and licensing them for others to use under a Creative Commons license.

And so Flickr became a fertile ground for innovation: HaikuDeck uses Flickr's database of licensed photos for presentation backgrounds. The Canvas LMS uses Flickr's database for images to incorporate into course pages to make them more interesting. Flickr is one of the featured databases on the Creative Commons search engine. There are lots of interesting educational possibilities for all of these, and more creative ways to use Flickr as well--I'm sure there are all kinds of other co-opted technologies that teachers can use for as EdTech tools that draw on this incredible, sharable, resource.

And so I was really, really sad a couple months ago to get this email from Flickr: Why we're changing Flickr free accounts. Basically, Flickr is changing their business model. And, really, I get it...they were giving away an awful lot of free storage space to an awful lot of people, and they have to pay the bills.

But for a guy like me who had contributed thousands of photos to the community over about 5 years, it was a hard thing to go through my albums and trim them down to less than 1000, which is my limit now, unless I sign up for a paid account. There are still all kinds of great photos out there, and they are still searchable, and sharable, and usable under a CC license...but it feels sad to me somehow.

And I guess that's what I'm reflecting on today: what happens when a technology that is co-opted as an EdTech tool by teachers has a change in pricing structure, or a change in availability, or goes completely belly-up. (Like TodaysMeet and Wikispaces did last year--two of my favorite, go-to tech tools that became educational technologies for me are no longer with us.)

It's a tricky thing, trying to get by on cheap or free when it comes to tech tools. And with Flickr flickering for me...I'm just feeling a little disillusioned, I guess.

This gorgeous image by Jonas Tana [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]