Abstract:

Photographs and other images are essential in teaching and learning in most fields of knowledge. Getting images right in educational settings promotes clarity and student understanding; getting them wrong subverts knowledge itself, and is confounding for teachers and students alike. However, for students, (and even some educators), assessing the ability of images to be trusted as a true representations of people, places, events, and information, and preparing their own images in a credible way, is complex and often poorly understood. This impacts upon knowledge production and use; one study suggests that there may be as many as 35,000 papers indexed by PubMed alone so seriously affected by image manipulation problems that they may be candidates for retraction (Bik et al, 2018). Online, there is still a clear lack of understanding of image credibility (Shellenberger, 2016). As far as securing image rights in an open source, online world, few students have even heard of Creative Commons image licenses, let alone understand how these licenses can control how their images can be used by others.

In a project underway at the Australian National University, I have been collecting data on university student image manipulation perspectives, and assembling an Image Credibility Teaching Suite for use across the breadth of the University. The data shows that there is little commonality in views on image credibility amongst university students and researchers. From these data and other associated research I present factors central to supporting credible use of photographs and images in education.

References:
[1] Bik, Elisabeth M. et al (2018) Analysis and Correction of Inappropriate Image Duplication: The Molecular and Cellular Biology Experience. Molecular and Cellular Biology. doi: 10.1128/mcb.00309-18
[2] Shellenberger, Sue (2016) Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds. The Wall Street Journal.

Keywords:

Image manipulation, knowledge credibility, fake photos.