Love or hate memes, you have to admire the viral nature of an effective meme.

The term meme was originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”; it refers to “A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another”. Blogging memes normally involve a series of questions that a blogger answers and passes onto other blogs by tagging other bloggers to participate. Memes provide lots of link love to the previous tagger, people tagged and the originator of the meme.

Miguel Guhlin’s Passion Quilt meme, started on 10 February, has been incredibly viral — especially with educational bloggers. The idea is we could create our own passion quilt by each contributing an image that captures what we most passionately want children to learn in school…from our particular perspective.

The Passion Quilt meme’s rules are:

• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

The Passion Quilt meme now has over 70 participants which you can follow by subscribing to either of these RSS feeds for the tag term “passion quilt”using your feed reader e.g. Google Reader:

• Google Blog Search
• Technorati

Bringing The Passion Quilt Meme Together

Definitely this meme has captured the hearts of many educators however:

1. Miguel now challenged with how to bring it all together; combine the images with the words – he would like to compile the key words and images when I have a free moment but isn’t quite sure which tool and how to encourage the images to connect.
2. As Allison Miller points out, it would be nice to track the meme’s travel.

My solution would be to encourage each participant to:

• Read Skelliwag’s A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images and The Flickr Guide, Part 2: How to Caption or Credit Photos in Posts to learn more about using copyright free images and how to credit them. I’ve recommended which Flickr Creative Commons license I would use plus include a link to each below.
• Combine their photo and words together (include as well their name, blog name, date and credit for the photo used) – here is my example that I created quickly using Flickr Creative commons and PowerPoint (choose save as jpeg instead of PowerPoint).

• Upload to Flickr using the tag term passionquilt08
• Geotag their Flickr passion quilt photo so everyone can check out each location on the Flickr map – here is my image on Flickr so you can check out how I have tagged, described and geotagged it. If you want to learn how to add the hyperlinks to your blog and the photo in your Flickr description here is my explanation of how you do it.

• Create the slide show using Flickr – check out how Alan Levine did this for his Virtual Worlds presentation

Adding Value To The Passion Quilt Meme

The value of this is two fold:

• Means the words and images can easily be connected; and the passion quilt grown visually and geographically
• Plus participants have differing skills levels – fantastic opportunity for professional development for all of us – providing an excellent opportunity to make the Passion Quilt meme considerably more meaningful than just another meme.

Using Creative Commons Flickr Photos

Remember when using photos from Flickr:

• To check their license and only use in a manner stated in their license
• “All rights reserved” means you can not use the photo without permission from the author
• There are a range of different Creative commons licenses; each impose different restrictions on how you use the images. I strongly recommend that you read Skellie’s A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Flickr Images for an excellent overview of creative commons licenses.
• All images licensed under Creative commons means that you are required to credit the author with a link back to their profile. You do this by inserting below the photo the link e.g. Photo by Sue Waters.

I would stick to searching and using Flickr photos licensed under any of the following Creative Commons categories (these licenses allow you to add words or make adaptations to the photos):

• Flickr Creative commons – Attribution license
• Flickr Creative commons – Attribution-NonCommercial License
• Flickr Creative commons – Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
• Flickr Creative commons – Attribution ShareAlike License

Thanks To

Yep — Robin, Kathryn (Hapy Birthday 🙂 ) and Sue — I haven’t quite followed the rules of the Passion Quilt meme that you passed onto me (perhaps Darren’s been educating me?) however I hope you will join me in encouraging others to follow my suggestions to add value to the meme.

UPDATE

You can check out the growth of the Passion Quilt on Flickr:

• Here is the SlideShow
• Search the Flickr World Map using the tag term passionquilt08

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