One of the favorite ed shibboleths is the one about how 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.” Content is just data with a short shelf-life in the era of Google.
A study by University College London for the British Library makes that case a little harder to make. The “Google Generation” are certainly more comfortable with technology, but knowing how to search and being good at it are not the same. Indeed, the report labels as ” a dangerous myth” the notion that kids born after 1993 are expert searchers. “A careful look at the literature over the past 25 years finds no improvement (or deterioration) in young people’s information skills,” says the report. “The information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology. In fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems.” Among them…
- Speed kills: “Young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority.”
- Info glut: “Faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented.”
- 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.”
Whether or not our young people really have lower levels of traditional information skills than before, we are simply not in a position to know,” the report concludes. “However, the stakes are much higher now in an educational setting where ‘self-directed learning’ is the norm. We urgently need to find out.”
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