Another way that the LoC has embraced new technology is by launching pilot projects on services like Flickr.  Currently, the LoC has two collections on its Flickr photostream, one for historic newspapers and the other for historic photographs.  The newspaper collection contains over 450 images, while the historic photograph one contains 13 sets with thousands of images.  Sets cover topics such as “News in the 1910s”, “Baseball Americana”, “1930s-1940s in Color”, and “Gottlieb Jazz Photos”.

Most, if not all, of the images have no known publication or usage restrictions, which means that you should be free to use these images for any purpose in your classes.  Here are some sample images from the collections (note: these images are not the original sizes).

The LoC is actively developing this pilot project by adding new images.

What’s really exciting about the LoC’s use of Flickr is that, now, visitors to the collection can link comments to specific portions of an image (useful for helping the LoC itself to identify “mystery” images in their extensive offline collections) in addition to leaving comments just like you can on this blog.

History, English, and Art teachers should be especially excited about these images, because they provide an outstanding way to put visual primary sources into your students’ hands.

The LoC’s Flickr collection is free to use and access, with no account required.  You will need an internet-connected computer with a modern web browser.

To that end, I have created a proposal for a new, online training course in Lutheran Apologetics for the Guild.  You may download a PDF version of this proposal here.  As you can see, this is not the complete course, rather, it is a detailed explanation of the rationale for it, a defense of the Lutheran apologetic itself, and an outline of the structure of the proposed course.

I am looking for one (or more) volunteers to collaborate with me in fleshing out the details of this course and in actually conducting it for several sessions.  If you are interested, please email me at biddlej@lutheraneducators.com.

This course focuses on helping Lutheran educators familiarize themselves with Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) and provide guidance as they work to create their own.  It is divided into two sessions, each lasting two weeks, with an estimated time commitment of 2-3 hours per session.  Thanks to the flexibility of Moodle, you will be able to choose the times that best fit your schedule to complete the course tasks, while still interacting with other participants through the course software.

To take part in this course, you will need an Internet-connected computer (PC or Mac) with a current Web browser (Firefox 3.x, Internet Explorer 8, Safari 4), PDF reading software, Flash and Shockwave players, and word processing software.  This course is being offered free of charge to the Lutheran Educators’ Guild community.

The course will officially begin June 7, 2010 and run through July 5, 2010.  Registrations will remain open until June 4, 2010.  If you are interested in participating, please create a learn.lutheraneducators.com user account then send an email to webmaster@lutheraneducators.com to request the course enrollment key.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

Update: Thanks to @andrew_cph we have a screenshot of the new interface from an Apple iPhone.