The Past
Think back. Do you remember sitting in your library sifting through books and encyclopedias looking for information on a particular topic you were researching? With each resource you went deeper into that topic, learning more about the many facets that you had never even considered. Sure, there was some wasted time as you weeded out articles and books that were of little use to you. But even those resources provided valuable learning experiences, as you learned why they were not useful (too advanced, wrong audience, different point of view, too biased, etc.) Research used to mean building a deep understanding of a complex topic, it seems that today, student understanding of research has changed.
The Present
Google has changed our lives in so many ways. I can look up the address of a restaurant where I am meeting friends in 4 seconds flats. I can even decide what I am ordering before I get there by looking up their menu online. I can suggest we see a movie, American Sniper, afterward and look up the movie showtimes. I can get thousands of reviews for the movie and directions to the theater. But what happens when I try to Google the conflict in the middle east that is central to the plot of the movie. This is not something I would normally research, so Google "assumes" that I am looking for information about Middle Eastern countries. I get results like travel blogs, weather reports, photo blogs, along with a few news stories about recent events. Even when I add "Chris Kyle" the movie's character, I get movie reviews, book reviews, and People magazine articles about his wife and the Oscar buzz surround the movie and its director Clint Eastwood. This doesn't just happen to me, this happens with our students too. Suppose they are researching the holocaust and our school search filters are set so as to remove any "offensive material," or google "assumes," based on their past searches, they are not looking for factual information about the events of WWII, but cartoon representations, or video games based on WWII. The student could easily end up with a very shallow research pool to choose from. Students are now used to the fast-paced research process that Google allows them, and seeing those results, will likely take what they can from the results, answer the question quickly and hand it in; not even thinking to look deeper, or to go beyond Google. So what can we do to encourage them to go beyond the "google hits."
The Future
We need to educate students to this phenomena. We need to show them other ways to search. We need to model using other search engines like clusty.com which allows them to quickly change direction and narrow searches by keywords from a word cloud. Or for the more visually motivated, we can use search engines like Quintura.com or search-cube.com. If they are still attached to Google we can teach them to use Google Scholar to expand their searches into the realm of authoritative, high-quality works that are useful for research purposes. There are so many more tools available, when students stop after a simple Google search, sure they may have answered the question posed by the teacher but they likely did not expand their understanding of the topic.
Education and research is about so much more than doing, exactly what the teacher asks and nothing more. It is about exploring and developing our own unique viewpoints. If you stop your research efforts with Google (which bases its results on your usual searches) then you will in all likelihood not be discovering alternate points of view. You will not be expanding your understanding of a topic and in short, you will always think how you've always thought. If the point of research is to go beyond our current understanding of a topic, we need to give students search alternatives, we need to teach them to go outside of the Google bubble!
How To:
- Homepage Links to alternate search sites
- Model searching through different sites
- Explain filter bubbles
- Show how different people get different results with identical keywords
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