We're only a few weeks from Daylight Savings Time (Sunday, March 11) followed shortly thereafter with the start of Spring. Which means winter is finally winding down. Although we did get about 5 inches of snow today, the biggest snowfall of the season.
One of the big changes occurring today is how we remember things (not just because we're getting older!). There's a lot of discussion about the "Google Effect" which says that people really don't have to remember things so much as to remember where to find them.
Google (Bing, Yahoo, whatever) has changed education immensely.
When I was in school (yes, they did have electricity back then), we had a set of Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia at home for reference. (Actually, back then, the local A&P sold the next book in the set (99¢) every week with the purchase of something). The set did get outdated fast so I ended up at the library, looking through their books, to do my research.
Today I can go online and search for anything I want. I'm led to different sites (after the ads show up) including Wikipedia for my answers. The problem is that the "best" result may not be the first one that shows up. The "poster" has added so many mega-tags and keywords to be sure they're first. They're information may not be accurate. So I have to dig deeper, all the way to page 135 (of 72 million) to find the information I need.
So students who rely on just the Internet for their research may stop at the first page that shows up and uses that for their research.
The question then becomes "Are we getting smarter using search engines? Are we retaining all the information we can?"
Recently there was a big story about some US soldiers who used "SS" as their insignia on a flag. When they were asked about the significance, they didn't know. History wasn't a part of their education.
Here's a post that goes into more depth. Could Search Engines be Damaaging Learning
No comments:
Post a Comment