About six months ago I wrote a post in which I featured an egregious example of improperly citing an image found on the Internet. One of my Facebook friends just reminded me of this by posting another Buzzfeed-like link about New England sayings. I looked at the article and the first thing that jumped out at me is that the images and text in the “article” are all attributed to Facebook. The site hosting the article did not name the owner of the images, the author of text that is quoted, didn’t link to their sources nor indicated that any of the text or images was used by permission. I took a screenshot and added my comments to it. You can see my screenshot below.

Click image to view full size.

Applications for Education
Feel free to use this example of how not to site an image in any lesson that you teach to students about providing proper attribution.

Between great public domain image sources like Pixabay and Creative Commons image search tools there are few occasions when students should have to resort to claiming fair use to use a copyrighted image. If they do end up at that step, they should at least give proper credit to the owner of the image.

The Flickr CC Attribution Helper created by Alan Levine offers an easy way to properly format citations for images that you find on Flickr. I created a tutorial for that handy tool. You can see the tutorial here.