TILW2.0 - Water Bottle - Metadata

Technology Req.: None.
You will need: One store bought water bottle. (Note: This can be any type of bottle,
but I find a non descriptive transparent liquid adds to the mystery.)
Overview
Searching with information technology relies heavily on the concept of metadata. Get your students to think about how much we rely on “labels” in the real world to search, evaluate, and retrieve anything.
Directions
This is where my water bottle comes in. Its a little corny, but here's an example of what you might say:

Take this water bottle for example. How do you know this is water? All you see is clear liquid substance in a plastic bottle. Although the label says its water from the South Pacific Islands, for all you know it could be just tap water, or a secret stash of vodka I keep in my desk to get me through these classes (laugh). But if you saw this on a shelf, all you would have to go on is the label on the bottle.

So now you got them thinking about things being represented by their
labels. Using this example makes it easier to explain metadata as a “label”
representing information.

Tags: TILW2.0, metadata, searching, Information Literacy, Libraronin