I thought Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything was interesting. The discussion on the Googlization of educators and students especially resonated with me, because I’ve seen up close what the author discusses.

The author points out that Google is perhaps the dominant way in which we interact with the internet, and, as a result, wields considerable power. Its biases (found in its algorithms) become our biases. These biases affect us: when we do research via Google (and let’s not lie, we all do), how often do we look past the first page? It doesn’t matter if the information is accurate; it’s on the first page.

When I first started teaching at LaGuardia, I did an exercise which involved students googling Rev. Martin Luther King, jr.  At the time, the third or fourth link was to a MLK webpage that looks official but is completely wrong and racist. It was put up by Stormfront, a white nationalist hate group. I did this to show that you can’t totally trust Google’s results. (As for the website, it has since been taken down.)

I’m not blaming my students. I frequently do the same thing, and, in fact, have probably believed wrong information. It’s common. I was trying to show students what to look for on a website so that they could judge the accuracy of the information.

Google dominates research for our students. I mentioned on the first day of class that I run something call the States Project, wherein my students have to produce a three minute long video about one of the fifty states.

When we start the project, I tell them that they can find most of the information they need on their state’s official website, the state’s tourism board website(s), local news sources, and, for demographics, census.gov.

Students usually don’t use these sites. (Maybe I should require them.) I have had to ban certain websites, mostly because they’re either encyclopedias or aimed at kids. Typically, students type the question into google and just go wherever it takes them. Further, if they don’t find the information on THAT website’s first page, they complain that “they can’t find the answer to the question.”

But, as I said above, I don’t know that I can really fault them that much. When I start researching a subject, I go to Google first. Of course, especially if it’s research for work, I do switch over to other databases, but I start with Google, and when I know nothing about the topic, I start at Wikipedia.

As the author said, the whole issue is information literacy: our students don’t really have info literacy skills. We have to teach them. I think we have to integrate Google into these efforts, because students are going to use it anyway. So, let’s give them the skills to analyze what they find and show them other databases to give them more option AND more access to scholarly work.