…or how keeping up with social software might help with your actual job.

A little while back, my friend and colleague Sarah, the Academic Technology Specialist for the Humanities here at CC, asked me if I had any ideas for an art history professor who was looking for software that would enable her students to annotate a digital image of a work of art.

Sure! Not only will Flickr let you annotate an image, but I knew that someone had done it before for an art history class.

So after about a two-minute “training session” on Flickr, Rebecca Tucker, the art history professor (and also a friend and colleague), was ready to give it a try. This block (CC is on a somewhat unique block plan where students take one course at a time for four weeks) she is team-teaching a class on Dante and Michelangelo, and has asked her students to comment on Giotto’s Satan from the Arena Chapel. (I can’t link to the actual Flickr page since Rebecca has made it visible only to her Flickr friends–i.e, the students in the course and me–but you can get the idea from the screenshot here).

It remains to be seen if this is the best thing since sliced bread. She might decide that Flickr doesn’t offer everything she’d like in this kind of project, or that there is some other problem with this assignment. But this is an example of something that Stephen Abram mentioned in the Meme 2.0 web discussion the other day: academic libraries need to get e-learning support at the lesson level.

Once the assignment/course is over, I’ll try and post again with Rebecca’s (and the students’?) reactions.