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 high marks) had actually sabotaged the education and testing of the very student it was supposed to be educating.

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.

Long 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 (22–38 years old) and placed them in a group. Then we take another cross-sectional of people who are GenX (39 years old+).

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 as a search tool.

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 “Millenial Google Search Failure” may, ironically, be a direct result of the advent of highly effective search engines like Google…and what was left behind.

What about Dewey?

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 when I think about it.

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 specifically the keyword card catalog.

How to research with Dewey

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. 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.

What could the “Dewey Disconnect” mean?

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.

If you never had to actually sit down and deliberately practice contextual association as a student, you might never learn to use Google effectively.

I think this is what happened to most Millennials. 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. Believe it or not, most Millennials I’ve spoken to recently don’t have a clue what the card catalog system was — or about old Dewey for that matter.

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.

A Key Manual Practice

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? Could the removal of such a simple manual practice precipitate loss of skill in research tasks, all because a research technology replaced the practice itself?

In the next post, we’ll explore a specific example of where shifting a manual practice can generate a dramatic change in actual skill. Is it possible, by making a single change, to alter a student’s art skills? Could you make them immediately better at basic drawing with this technique?

Short-Circuit Education (3 of 5): Broken perspective — or when the right side up is upside down