Short-Circuit Education, 2 of 5: Consequences of the Google Effect
Google’s rise in the early 2000s may have eliminated a critical learned research behavior
So our last conversation (link here, if you need to review), we discussed an example of “Digital Anti-Math” where my own son was being defined in kindergarten as Bad-At-Math when in actuality, he was outwitting the school’s math game and subsequently guessing (and failing) his way through math tests.
In short, the game technology itself (a math game that had been lauded with accolades as best of its kind) had actually sabotaged the education and testing of the very student it was supposed to be educating. I also pointed out that there’s plenty of potential questions on who is to blame for why it wasn’t detected/recognized earlier.
Now it’s time to look at another bizarre educational short-circuit.
The Google Effect
I can’t remember most phone numbers. Neither can you, I bet. I wouldn’t be surprised if they found that most people under 30 would have trouble reciting any phone numbers at all. This is a result of the Google effect, a phenomenon where people increasingly depend on highly accessible digital technology to store knowledge instead of leveraging their working memory.
Gone are the days where people learn to recite…well anything, honestly. If we expect to be able to “Google” the answer, we don’t bother committing it to memory…and this is becoming more and more common. But, while this disturbing trend of redirecting the tasks usually regulated to our working memory may not bother you…the deeper consequences definitely should.
The Great Google-Off: Young versus Old
Let’s imagine that you took a cross-section of Millenials (1981 to 1996) and placed them in a group. Then we take another cross-sectional of people who are GenX (1965–1980).
Now, the challenge: Who would do better research on a topic on Google.com — GenX or Millenials?
Tough choice?
The answer is GenX…and by a country mile. Some of the research done suggests absolutely maddening scenarios, including the inability to articulate appropriate questions to a librarian regarding a Google search. Millennials (at least a fair number of them) are unable to use Google Search with anything near the effectiveness of the previous generation (and I suspect that pattern continues with older generations to some degree as well).
Note: take a look when you get the chance — don’t take my word for it… https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-dont-know-how-to-use-google-2015-5
Now, while the reason for this may seem inscrutable, I think it has a simple answer here. If it turns out that my pattern has any merit — this “Millennial Google Search Failure” may, ironically, be a direct result of the advent of highly effective search engines like Google…and what was left behind.
How Dewey got replaced with “Where’s Waldo?”
I realize some people reading this passage might not even know what Dewey Decimal Classification is at this point, a fact that genuinely makes my head hurt. But while this system is old, the way we learned to use it taught an incredibly important lesson in how to do search.
The Dewey Decimal Classification is the system by which all library books have been defined and organized since the end of the Civil War (1876). And when Google search came along, its use …at least non-librarians, got left behind. For those of you too old to remember, there was an approach to using this system called the card catalog, more officially referred to as the keyword card catalog.
Remembering the good-ol-days of Card Catalog Searches
Let’s go through it, just as a review.
To research a specific topic, you had to sit down (yes, with a real pencil and real paper) and scratch out a number of synonyms for the subject you were trying to track. If you were having trouble, you brushed the dust off the thesaurus in your house (yes, most people owned one) and use that to build your list.
Then, once you had 10–15 fairly decent synonyms, you looked up these terms in the card catalog which most often had a keyword organization (your best bet for a general search) which gave insight into where you could locate the right books on your topic.
If that didn’t quite get the job done, you went back to the thesaurus and you tried again, looking for still more keywords that could be associated with the subject you were trying to research. If you were really clever, you looked in the books for indexes that could give you ideas for more keywords that hadn’t occurred to you in your search already.
The most important aspect of this “older” search process is that it reflects how most modern search engines “think” about the internet. Those who know how to use keyword searches in the card catalog are also those who excel at search engines. The strategy (the right one, anyway) is identical.
In the web design and development community, which knows Google better than most, it is well known that the “mind-mapping” of contextual associations between potential keywords is at the core of effective Google search.
The difference in search skills between Millennials and GenX-ers is straightforward. If you never had to actually sit down and deliberately practice contextual association as a student and no one showed you how to think of search that way, you might never learn to use Google effectively.
By the mid-2000s, most students were using search engines to find things because the card catalog had been replaced by computerized search engines, if not Google itself. I think this is the missing practice that affects most Millennials. Believe it or not, most Millennials I’ve spoken to don’t know what the card catalog system was — and were never trained to use such strategies in the first place.
My hypothesis is that the failure to go through this card-catalog-to-Dewey learning path resulted in many Millennials failing to become indoctrinated into a greater contextual perspective. Being at the tail end of Generation X, I was among the last to leverage a keyword card catalog in a library and spelling out a key difference between Generation X and Millennials that followed.
Sometimes the manual practices are better than the digital ones.
If that hypothesis bears some merit — and it might…what does that mean for the larger pattern of this Short Circuit Education?
- Could the abandoned manual practice of card catalog research possibly create substantial cracks in the foundation of how students conduct a basic search on Google or at a library?
- Is it possible that digital practices that are replacing manual ones are actually doing the following generations a disservice?
- If so, can we pinpoint the places where digital services cannot replace a manual practice without disabling our skills?
In the next post, we’ll explore a specific example of where shifting a manual practice is almost guaranteed to generate a dramatic increase in actual skill, even though the change itself was relatively simple.
Short-Circuit Education (3 of 5): Broken perspective — or when the right way up is upside down
