In some fields, the lineage of digital information affects its validity, and therefore its usability in a learning context. This is true for the empirical sciences, for geographic information systems, for legal chain-of-custody, and other fields. And yet, much of this lineage information is never captured, or even if known, is not captured in metadata. Many educators create their own contents, and they just keep the information about the information lineage in their heads…and assume that it’ll always be there in their long-term memory.

Who Cares where it’s From?

Many of the educators I work work do not really care where something came from as long as it meets their educational needs. These apply to interviews, video snippets, diagrams, images, and audio files. Oftentimes, if the information provider is a trusted media source, they may be fine… But sometimes, these are contents from public repositories where anyone can upload anything…and then it becomes a massive pain to track the original owner.

For a nutrition professor, we tracked an image that he wanted through several websites that were hosting it on their servers…and never found the original owner. The photo itself went by a number of names, and because it wasn’t labeled, it was near impossible to track. It could have been in the public domain, or it could have had (sloppy) copyright protections. One couldn’t tell based on what was findable on the WWW.

Automated Metadata Captures

Various technologies now have automated metadata captures, or this is in process. This will capture a GPS location and time of the image capture, and that and other metadata will be automatically wrapped into the processing of the digital image.

It seems wise to capture relevant information in an automated way. On the flip side, this is another step in the giving up of privacy and some mystery in the modern world.