Using Google Safely
It's college reunion time, and at my college the activities offered to returning alums include a selection of faculty lectures. I went to two yesterday, one about an obscure Italian guitarist of the seventeenth century, now less obscure due to the efforts of the music historian who reported to the eight of us in attendance on her research into the man's life.Much better attended by an order of magnitude was a lecture by a member of the computer science faculty titled, "How Google Works and Why You Should Care." The professor's argument was that Google and other search engines are in a constant battle to stay ahead of spam artists who contrive to get their websites to the top of listed search results by gaming the algorithms used to determine page rank.
Aside from appreciating the chance to get some deeper insight into the way search engines work, I was taken with the professor's conclusion that education today must not only ground everyone in the 3 R's, but also teach critical thinking, something I've written about in an earlier post. You need to be able to answer such questions as:
- How do you know "fact" X? What sources have you used? How reliable are they? More generally, How do we know what we know?
- Why do you trust or distrust a particular source? For instance, does a particular site in a list of Google search results have actual experts producing the content? As the professor emphasized more than once, anybody can post content on the web, including, for instance, eager-beaver teen-agers and malicious fraudsters.
- Do you have a "trust network," a group of people you interact with (in some cases, only through Internet contact) who have earned your trust, so that you can turn to them for reliable answers to questions?
Labels: Critical thinking
posted by Karen Nelson @ 10:16 PM
<< Home