The “Google generation” isn’t great at googling, writes Nate Anderson at Ars Technica, pointing to a study by the British Library. It’s a “dangerous myth” that those born after 1993 are “expert researchers,” the report concludes. Young people’s information skills haven’t improved over the last several decades. “Choosing good search terms is a special problem for younger users.” He summarizes the study’s conclusions about the Google generation.
* They like to cut-and-paste. “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
* They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
* They multitask all the time. “It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”
The report also warns librarians against opening MySpace and Facebook pages to “make their servicers hipper to students.”
. . . “there is a considerable danger that younger users will resent the library invading what they regard as their space.”
At Core Knowledge Blog, Robert Pondiscio discusses the study and the ed shibboleth that “it’s futile to teach content because the store of human knowledge increases too quickly.”
The goal of education should be to think critically and “learn how to learn.”
The report finds “little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority” when young people use the web, he notes.
* Kids don’t know what they don’t know: “The problem here is that they simply do not recognize that they have a problem: there is a big gap between their actual performance in information literacy tests and their self-estimates of information skill.”
Confident, but not competent. There’s a lot of that going around.
Part of what the searchers should be learning is to not take a single source at face value. Like this report, for example.
Some criticisms of the report here: http://www.downes.ca/post/43160
My experience has been among my college students, a lot of them are just kind of overwhelmed when it comes to looking for material. Even with very specific searches, (”Use the library’s journal article database to find scientific journal articles on your chosen research topic,”) they tend to get overwhelmed.
I also find that lots of folks aren’t good at evaluating the quality of information; to some, a peer-reviewed article and information off of an unknown “personal page” are considered by some to be equally reliable.
I’ve caught a few (but not many) students falling prey to the lure of cut-and-paste. Fortunately I am good at Googling and use it as an anti-plagiarism tool. (I’ve caught people who later said, “I thought you’d never find out!”)
“The goal of education should be to think critically and “learn how to learn.”
Sounds good. But…”to think critically” about what? This is like saying that the goal should be to teach them about speech generally and not English.
I almost had to chuckle here. I have a child born in 1993. He’s 14. I don’t know why there’s an expectation that children age 14 and younger are great at finding, researching, and evaluating information. When I grew up, in the age of the hardcover dictionary, I was imperfect at that age also. This is news?