Information Richness and Nomadic Teachers

David Warlick asks: “What are the pedagogies of information abundant learning environments?” in the context of Flickr hitting 100,000,000 Creative Commons licensed photos.

What are the implications of a vast array of easily accessible, legally usable photos for teachers and students? The cynic in me wants to say "Now we can legally do what we've been illegally doing all along..."

Many secondary school classrooms are still "information starved," I think. In situations where a teacher has a classroom that he or she alone exclusively uses each day, there is an ability and incentive to make that room information-rich. Teachers who travel from drab room to drab room each period, however, have less of this ability and incentive: less time to pull it off, and less reason to invest in a place where they only spend a fraction of their day. I think that this "geographical" factor -- that of "migrating, nomadic teachers" -- ironically, limits the use of information-rich resources (that are becoming less and less tied to geography as time goes on).

It is good to start thinking more about "information-rich classroom" pedagogy (I think that elementary teachers have more of a sense of this than secondary teachers), but I think that the physical and psychological implications of the nomadic teacher are limiting factors in developing and delivering such a pedagogy.