A principal recently asked me why project-based learning should involve the Web. It’s a good question.
In education, an “artifact” is not something old, but something new: a tangible object created by students during a lesson. It’s evidence of learning. A term paper, a book report in the form of a poster, and a baking soda volcano are all considered artifacts of the learning process.
When I heard this piece of education jargon, I thought of the term “metadata.” Metadata is data that describes data. The label on the tab of a manila folder in a filing cabinet tells us what is in the file. A timestamp embedded into a digital photograph describes the photograph. A hashtag inserted into a Tweet classifies that Tweet. These are all metadata.
Metadata is knowledge sorting the knowledge within.
In my book, The Interactive Voice, I describe social media as human metadata. The moment I post either text or imagery to my Facebook page, or to my Twitter handle, or under my byline, that knowledge comes up under an online search about me.
“Human metadata” is a more local, accessible way to think about art and creativity and also a more elevated, expansive way to think about what we say and do every day. Our online writing and photography are both plain old data as well as the artifacts of our lives.
What do we save when the house is on fire? We save the photo album, the memory box, the love letters and Christmas cards, and not just for sentimental reasons, but because they are our histories.
Metadata is also awareness.
I just wrote about how I call my courses “meta-courses” because I want students to become aware of my teaching process and develop their own.
Another helpful example of something “meta” occurs when an actor “breaks the fourth wall.” A character in a play or film suddenly looks at the audience, reminding the audience that they are watching a play or film. The acknowledgement takes them out of the momentum of the artifice.
In the play Hamlet, when the character Hamlet meets a troupe of actors and asks for a play within the play, he removes us from the reality of Shakespeare’s world and we become aware.
That awareness within art correlates with the awareness that makes humans unique. We live wrapped up in the momentum of our days, but also observe and manage our lives when we stop to reflect and plan. Consciousness gives us alone the title of homo sapiens or “wise humans.”
When we turn a moment into a paragraph or a photograph, we stand apart from life and grow more conscious of it. When teachers ask students to create artifacts, students have the chance to reflect on their thought and learning processes, just as they do with metadata and social media in my courses. When the Internet inspires people to create imagery and writing about their lives, people gain a greater awareness in the same way.
Media and social media are additional layers of consciousness in our lives. That’s why we need them in our schools.
In project-based learning, if small, rotating groups of students were placed in charge of documenting the process—creating social media artifacts of project artifacts—it would not only prepare them for editing their own multimedia metadata but force them to use and manage that metadata as another layer of consciousness, learning, and reflection.
Here is a preliminary sketch I drew up for the principal of how artifacts and metadata would flow within the academy (I’ve since replaced the original tailored proposal with a more generic version):