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• Trends in EdTech: March 13, 2007
• Ning
• Flickr
• Fototagger
• Article Archive

Read Newsletters & Articles :: Feature Articles

Trends in EdTech: March 13, 2007

Ning: New Social Networking Site

If you feel limited with your design choices in MySpace or Facebook, you might want to check out the new social networking site Ning. Like other social networking software, Ning allows you to create and join groups based on a common interest or theme. Unlike these other sites, Ning provides groups with highly configurable sites with an impressive tool set including: video hosting, photo blogging, discussion forums, chat space, and web spaces. Ning also has a University of Illinois connection - it's the latest enterprise of Illinois grad and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. You can check out Ning at: http://www.ning.com.

- Al Weiss

Two Options for Annotating Online Photos

Ever wish you could highlight some details in images you've posted online? Here are a couple of options.

Option 1: Our old friend Flickr provides a nice means for creating "hot" regions on images and attaching notes to those regions. Here's a sample (http://flickr.com/photos/dmills727/201369837/) from my Flickr site. Advantages of this approach are the ease of creating the annotations and the cross-platform/browser compatibility. Disadvantages are the lack of portability and flexibility - you can only see those annotations on THAT page, so if I add that image to my blog, the annotations don't appear there. Likewise, in this example I wish I could annotate one of the larger versions of the image (click on "ALL SIZES" link above the image itself) but that can't be done either.

Option 2: Fototagger is free Windows software available from www.fototagger.com. Once installed on your Windows machine, you can work with images on your computer or import images from your Flickr account. Along with some basic image editing functionality, you can create tags and link them to specific areas of the image. The tagged image can then be exported to a blog account, back to Flickr, or just to HTML. Here's an example (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/dmills/www/Prairie/PrairieProfusion.html) of a Fototagged image exported to my Netfiles account. Advantages of this approach include the portability (can put the Flickr example in my Netfiles account, in Compass, or in a blog posting - it stays on its Flickr homepage) and flexibility (I can work with the image at any size I want). Disadvantages include the fact that it's a Windows-only application for creating the images, the fact that the tags are either visible or invisible - no middle ground and apparently no flexibility about having them invisible when the page loads, and some incompatibilities with the code used to achieve the annotations (doesn't work correctly in Safari on the Mac, for example).

There ARE other options out there, but here are two options that are fairly straightforward to use and at least one of which may meet your needs. Want to know more? Just contact us at: edtech@illinois.edu.

- Doug Mills