Find and use 1 Million MORE images in the public domain on Flickr

If you are an Instructional Designer, Instructor, or Educational Developer, then you have a keen eye open for excellent free image repositories. The reason for this is because you know that a significant proportion of your students are visual learners. So you structure some of your content each week around some visual elements such as images and/or videos. However, you don’t fall into the classic pitfall:

Inserting images into a lesson just because they look nice.

Instead you choose images that directly facilitate achievement of the learning outcome you are striving towards. Perfect! For those fans of images from the 17th, 18th and 19th century, I have good news. The British Library has released over 1 million illustrations into the public domain using the world’s largest image repository, Flickr. All clearly tagged on Flickr as public domain with no known copyright restrictions, you are free to download, use, modify, re-mix and re-purpose any of these images for whatever reason you see fit – including education of course. Have a look by heading over the British Library's photostream and searching it for your favourite keyword. A quick search on “Advertisement” yielded this beauty!

From page 703 of the 1885 book entitled “History of Toronto and County of York, Ontario; containing an outline of the history of the Dominion of Canada ... biographical sketches, etc., etc. [By C. P. Mulvany, G. M. Adam and others.] Illustrated”

Cool. So if you are doing a course on Canadian History, maybe this type of image can fall into a particular lesson. Maybe a scavenger hunt is in order. One that gives a bonus mark to the student who can obtain a picture of this building as it is today - over 125 years in the future - if it still exists! There are so many possibilities in a teaching setting.

Bonus Tip: if you find an interesting image in this collection, be sure to add more relevant tags to it to make it more easily searchable by others. Share the wealth!

If you have any tips for using images in relevant ways in your courses, please leave a comment below.

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Flickr images for YOU!

Flickr allows its users to grant Creative Commons licenses to their photos and as a result many of these images can be available for YOUR use! There are different types of Creative Commons licenses and Flickr breaks them down for you and categorizes its database of photos accordingly. One example of a licence type is “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivitives License”. What this means is that you can use any image tagged with this license if you meet 3 conditions:

• Attribution: you must give credit to the photographer


• NonCommercial: you must not use the image for commercial purposes


• No Derivitives: you may not modify the image in any way

It turns out that at the time I am writing this posting there are over 23 million photos on Flickr that you can search and use with this license. WOW! It is a veritable Gold Mine for educators putting together course materials.

Check it out Flickr's Creative Commons page here.

Take care

    -Eric

PS: The image above was found on Flickr with a Creative Commons license. Credit to Kevin Day. [http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanagerphotography/556740737/]

PSS: I've posted on this blog before about free image databases, add Flickr to the list now.

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Putting the microscope on Flickr

Last semester I taught an Introductory Microscopy laboratory course. The course was basically divided into 3 parts:

1. Microscope operation
2. Basic histology
3. Specimen preparation

There was no required textbook for the course and a lab manual containing protocols and theory was provided. In past offerings of this course, students had great difficulty with the 3-week long basic histology section because they had very little resources they could study with at home. The laboratory manual was not detailed enough to compete with commercially available textbooks in histology. So students had difficulty studying away from the lab. A histology textbook was not added to the required readings list because it was difficult to justify the additional cost if this textbook was only to serve a 3-week period in the course. (Histology textbooks are expensive!) In the absence of any significant material to study from at home, it proved difficult for students to assimilate the material with the mandatory laboratory time alone. Some were creative and used Google to surf some online histology sites at other institutions.

This year we tried something different. We (*Thanks Nancy!*) photographed all the histology specimens used in the lab and we posted them all to the Flickr photo sharing website. Additionally, we annotated the photos to give students a guide to the hallmark features of the specimens. With this resource available to students anywhere they could find a computer, all of a sudden studying away from the lab became much more effective. The results were such that the grades went up when compared to last year! Students reportedly loved the online Flickr resource. They found it a major advantage to their studying and they placed great value in being able to visualize on the web the exact slide that they used in class.

From an instructor perspective Flickr was a joy to use. No special technical knowledge was required to use it. No significant photo editing, no HTML coding, very easy to annotate photos, organization of photos was simple and the best part was that it was free. Flickr is completely free if you use less than 250 images. So the effort to create this student resource was very manageable.

So clearly this was a win:win for both students and instructors.

Want to see it? It’s publicly available here.

What do you think? Would this work for you? Post your comment below.

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