More on the “Google Generation”
Posted: January 8th, 2010 | 3 Comments »I have posted some links on generations lately (see “Enter the Millennials“, “About youth“) ahead of the upcoming sessions on the matter at Lift10. Here comes further information from a University College London study, on the now called Google Generation, those born after 1993 and referred below as the “young people”:
- 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
- internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority
- young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies
- as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective
- faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them
- young people have unsophisticated mental maps of what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that it is a collection of networked resources from different providers
This graph on article discovery strategies is also interesting:
Link (thx Bruno G)
reposted. :-)
Fascinating and based on my experience as a academic and educator, surprisingly accurate of some even older “young people” (i.e. those born after about 1989) in important ways. Media literacy is in short supply these days!
Thank you for linking and bringing this up. One main thing that irks me is the tone of how research is presented. Facts are facts. The highest value is how this facts are transformed or “rephrased” into a way of thinking.
I see the “short-fast- searching” of the google generation a characteristic strength rather than a judgement of how they do not go indepth with patience and analysis. At their age when we were young – we weren’t even “searching”.
They have the capacity of being a more powerful generation – in fact, what we are able to learn from them and understand gives us the capability to make potentials into possibilities. But their potential very much is linked to how we can connects the dots and empower them.
The real power comes from the teacher or the ‘master-minder’.