Google Generation January 19, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Data, Opinion.trackback
Ars Technica has posted a review of a study by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee that provides some interesting insights into the habits of kids born since 1993. Here is an excerpt:
So what’s true 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.”
Not surprising to me is the observation that young students are not experts at searching, especially when it comes to choosing good search terms. Vocabulary, and life experience, play a role in knowing what terms to use when searching. Both of those qualities are in short supply for the youngest students. I can remember creating my own chart of words and how they were related to each other at a very young age. I did this for my own information, to help in constructing my own world view. I knew then that words played a big part in how I understood and interacted with the world. I’m not confident that many young people would see any benefit to constructing their own diagram of connections for the concepts or words that comprise their personal cosmology.
The challenge in the classroom hasn’t changed from the time I was a child. We still need to open doors and show our students that they do indeed have a brain, that they can make up their own mind, and apply various tools (rationality, artistry, intuition, spirituality, compassion, passion, etc.) to that end. The sources of information may be changing from printed material to digital, but the challenge remains the same.
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