The "Google Generation" is growing. What started with teens and younger demographics has spread like wildfire in recent years. Google has become ubiquitous. When I graduated high school, Google was only two years old. We had the internet in my house and at several friends' houses, but we rarely used it. Dial up internet speeds made it a chore, waiting 2 minutes on a site to open often times just to lose your connection and have to start over. Twenty years later, my friends and I carry high speed, high powered computers in our pockets and Google has become a verb. Whenever we have discussions and someone wonders something that we don't have the answer to, it's often met with the response "Google it". This happens almost every time we're together. It happens when I'm by myself too. I start wondering about something, and pull my smartphone out of my pocket and look it up.
The research habits of the "Google Generation" found in the study "Information Behaviour of the Reseacher of the Future", have become my research habits. When trying to find information on a topic, I typically start with a Google search then I skim through the headings that pop on the search. If I am unable to find what I'm looking for, I may add another word to try to refine it. This is a crude process without much forethought to how searches work. Admittedly, I didn't know many strategies before beginning this course. Then I skim through some articles trying to find the information I wanted. In these ways I am very much like the "Google Generation".
A glaring difference I see between myself and the researchers mentioned in the study is the ability to determine if sources are credible and using fact checking techniques. I was fortunate to have parents that taught me to be skeptical of things people said or wrote. The old saying "trust, but verify" was a common practice in my house. I was also fortunate to have to incredible language arts teachers in high school that taught me how to research effectively and how to verify information from multiple sources. These practices are useful today for the "Google Generation", with some slight modifications. We should still be teaching students effective researching strategies (e.g. how to discern the reliability of a source, how to find slant/bias, etc.) at age/developmental appropriate times.
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I had forgotten how exciting and laborious dial up internet could be! I remember on slow days the information would come to the screen line by line. It might take several minutes for a full article to load. Now we are aggravated if a page takes longer than 10 seconds to load.
ReplyDeleteI, too, agree that we need to trust and verify our searches. We teach our students that we need to use sites that end in .edu, .gov, and .org to ensure that the information they get is valid. Now if we can only teach them that they need to read more than the first few sentences of an article before moving on...
I had dial up internet growing up too. Back then it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world because that's all that anyone knew about. Dial up compared to the internet now is very different. If we all had to deal with dial up internet now, I have a feeling that we wouldn't all be saying to "Google it" when we needed information. I definitely need to work on my ability to determine if sources are credible and use fact checking techniques. I agree with you, we should be teaching our students effective researching strategies at age appropriate times.
ReplyDeleteWe had a dial up connection as well when I was in elementary school. I can clearly remember all the arguments my parents and I had over this whenever they needed to use the telephone.
ReplyDeleteI can definitely relate to your statement about "Googling" everything question that comes to mind. I often find myself trying to self-diagnose my health problems (don't do that because WebMD makes you believe you are dying).
I also agree with your statement that we should be educating our students on research strategies. Although it would not be ideal to teach my first graders to use a Google search, I do believe students in the upper elementary level and above should be exposed to it.
I can remember dial up and tone phones and vcr, so I know how much technology has changed and how far I have come since then and I know that I need to keep up with it now to be relevant for my students today. Research is different from what I had to do before computers and card catalog was the new thing or typing on the desktop was the only computer time offered in class. I think it is a concern that student do not verify their information and rely on Google for everything.
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