Using Flickr to Connect a Multi-Campus Honors Community

Web 2.0 tools that facilitate social connections are popular among today's college students. Our students use social networks to stay connected with friends and family members. However, the networks can be more than just social; while maintaining their personal and community-building value, they can at the same time facilitate intellectual and artistic discussions on a common theme. The Pennsylvania State University is a large geographically dispersed, multi-campus institution. Twenty of the twenty-four campuses provide undergraduate programming, and each campus has its own honors program under the umbrella of the Penn State Honors Consortium. The consortium focuses its mission on establishing guidelines and common requirements across all honors programs. The campus programs offer a variety of similar activities for academic engagement in honors at the campus, including honors-designated courses, honors travel-abroad opportunities, speaker series, etc. Although the consortium acts to bring together each of the campus honors coordinators, it does not connect the students across programs. One area on which we have recently decided to focus our efforts is creating a sense of community among the honors students across all the campuses. As the campuses are located across the state of Pennsylvania, with some campuses as much as seven hours away from one another, it is not feasible to coordinate face-to-face student meetings. Therefore, we have turned to online tools to forge the connections, specifically the use of the photo-sharing tool Flickr . Inspiration for a cross-campus photography collaboration came from an email message posted on the NCHC listserv in fall 2008 by the Macaulay Honors College at The City University of New York. Macaulay Honors College was looking for other honors colleges to partner with them for their "Snapshot NYC" program. The program asks every first-year student to take a picture related to a common theme. A faculty and student curatorial team then selects photographs for a student exhibition. The Penn State Honors Consortium thought that we could also use photography to connect our own university students on separate campuses. At our fall 2008 Honors Consortium meeting, we discussed the NCHC posting and decided that we would use Flickr to pilot a university-wide honors program student collaborative project. Flickr is an "online photo management and sharing application" that allows us to create a community to which authorized members contribute images viewable by the general public. We were excited to show students an academic use of Flickr rather than just posting and organizing personal photographs for social networking. The honors coordinators decided on a theme for the students to frame the project. The term "EVOLVE" was selected to represent historic tributes and events in early 2009, such as the two-hundredth birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln as well as the inauguration of the first African American president. Students were encouraged to consider what the term "EVOLVE" meant to them and how to represent that meaning through a photograph. Each student was required to provide a title and description for the photograph contributed to the Flickr group. The deadline to post the photographs online was February 12, the birthday of Darwin and Lincoln. The key to the "EVOLVE" project was not just taking and viewing photos but using the Flickr website to social network around an image. Overall we were pleased with our first attempt to create a cross-campus honors community. The "EVOLVE" project provided a new opportunity to incorporate active learning and Web 2. …