planet telex

I’ve been meaning to post some of my notes from lectures at the 2005 Festival of Ideas in Adelaide. The festival was held back in July, and yes I’ve been very slack in getting onto the job of putting my penciled notes to computer but now I’m going to slowly get to the arduous job and plonk on some of the more interesting parts to the blog…

The first lecture that I thought I had to post about was probably my favourite out of the entire event, which is saying something as the lectures were of great quality.

Tara Brabazon is an Associate Professor in Communication and Cultural Studies at Murdoch University (Perth, Western Australia), and director of the Popular Culture Collective.

Tara spoke on “The University of Google - Speed Searching and the Killing of Knowledge” a lecture that looked at the effect that google has had on her student’s ability to research and in turn how that has affected the essays and assignments that students write.

Tara started with the line “Technology is not the cause problems, but Google is encouraging poor thinking”

The lecture looked at some of the consequences of the proliferation of google, and in particular how google works. Tara pointed out that google’s origination was from engineering, not from the arts or education relm and that as a result google ranks results in this way:

Popularity
Credability
Quality
Objectivity
Balance

The point being made is that if we’re to believe google then we’re assuming that popularity equals quality, that simply because the site has received a number of links or hits the information held on the site is reliable and well researched. Google’s proliferation meant that students were no longer reading the required readings, nor were they active in the researching of relevant and correct information. Essays were becoming mind numbingly difficult to read and mark and bibliographies, instead of listing 5 or more texts from the course requirements were listing the top 5 results from google as if they were legitimate resources for information.

Tara suggested that she needed to develop a standardized response, one that would negotiate the space between Google returned searches and understanding what to do with them. The difficulty is that people were needing to refine their search fields, to do more research to backup the information that google was linking them to.

Tara made an interesting observation when she suggested that google occupies the space between:

Expectations and Reality
Information and Interpretation

Propaganda and Critical Theory

Tara was saying that people are currently either unable or just not willing to ask questions of the text that they source on the internet, she suggested that people need to be able to ask 5 preliminary questions of information from google:

Who authored the document?
What expertise does the author have?
What evidence is provided?
What genre is the document, is it a journal piece, academic paper, polemic or a blog post?
Is the site funded by an institution?

As she said this I thought to myself that I wish that people did the same with any piece of spam email that they receive, and how that would save me time deleting them. People need to improve their keywords, they need to ask questions of the text as they would in any book, searching for information in this case is not equivalent to understanding the information, nor is it necessarily acceptable research.

Another quote from the lecture that I liked was “There is an abundance of information. What we are lacking is the right information in the appropriate time and place.” The illusion that google and the rest of the internet has given us is that one can learn by using only resources from the internet, but the reality is that when one does that they are missing out on centuries of research and documented literary resources that have stood the test of time and scholarly research.

When we think that we can study virtually we need to recognize that one of the dictionary meanings of the word “virtual” is that of “almost” so when we think about it a little more virtual learning = almost learning…

What was needed was some form of intellectual fascism to bring the standard of her class assignments and class research back to scratch…

What Tara ended up doing was creating a process for students in her courses to follow before they were able to proceed with the authoring of their assignments. Students were expected to answer a number of questions before an assignment was approved, they also had to provide her with an annotated bibliography that she had to approve. The approach was to force students into learning the skills required in real academic research, what she found was that students took a while to warm to the idea, especially those who had lived on google-based research. But as the course has proceeded she has found that her students are valuing the new method and that the essay quality has increased.

Now, as a personal reflection I’m finding that google does much more than kill knowledge, the proliferation of the blogging community has meant that even sites that used to be top ranking because they were university lecturer websites and research sites have dropped in popularity in favour of blogs that people like to read and link to.

This has continued to harm, not only the intellectual world but I’m seeing similar results in the Christian scene, many young people I know are using what I see are dodgy websites to help form their faith, friends my age are reading blogs and accepting all that is said without question…

Perhaps google’s great sin is that our use of it has meant that people have forgotten to critically analyse any data that they are given, we’ve lost the art in discernment and that’s a frightening insight.

Tata, if I get the chance I’ll be doing a subject of yours in the next couple of years, you’re a fascinating person and your book “From revolution to revelation” was a phenomenal read…