What Would Google Do?
The past few days i have been reading the book What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis and i was awe-struck.
To summarize the book in very short form, what jeff is trying to bring across is the power of thinking like google. Example, the reason why google and facebook and such companies are so successful is because they depend on the user to impove a product that they produced, and the user therefore likes the product more. It is also cheaper to have people improve the products for you and therefore you can make the product cheaper and it more people are likely to buy or use the product.One section really made me think, the chapter called Google U:Opening education. The quote that i liked the most is:
“why are we still teaching students to memorize facts when facts are available though (google) search?
Like really, in biology, why do i have to remember the difference between a esophagous and a trachea and a lyrnx. It can be googled!!!! Teach us stuff that we cannot google as of yet. Stuff like dissection to see what a heart really feels like and how it works. Or just teach us where to find the information instead of what the information is. Just in case the teachers have not noticed, we are bored by terms and definitions, absolutely bored out of our living and young mind.
The things worth the teachers time as well as the students is critique on work, collaboration and improvements on one’s skills. Like in ELA, the feedback from the teacher is like eons more helpful than writing the difinitions of words that we dont know the meaning of.
And in math, teaching mental math is also eons more helpful than teaching us trivial formulas that we will never use and are completely bored by. We can GOOGLE the formulas for goodness sake. Yes i admit we might need the formulas on demand at times in life, but never as often in occurrence as mental math, which includes multiplication, addition, subtraction, division, and other such simple but important skills.
The one course that is still lacking in school is a course that teaches how to utilize the internet and touch a little on programming. Now that should be a compusurary course in highschool!!
Here’s why students need facts:
Memorizing facts is a prerequisite to be able to make meaningful and innovative connections. Without knowing such things as “what is a trachea” you cannot know how to operate on a human neck. You cannot ask google to make leaps of intuition and ingenuity for you; for that you need plenty of experience and facts inside your own consciousness, inside your own mind.
Google has its place. The mind has its own. Neither replace each other. Both are crucial in these times. Get real.
I think Google and its services are “the most” overused and over rated things on the net and in today’s life. I don’t think it should have gotten to the point where one multi-billion dollar company controls most of the internet and mostly whats “gets displayed” on it. Same goes for walmart who now invades the globe with huge super stores piled full of…..garbage. And no we as consumers have no control over what they tell us and and sell us. Google has very useful and nice services, but at the price of what? Free? no not free. Free to the consumer,but other companies paying several thousand dollars to get an ad on a page because yes, “they” chose what gets displayed.
Jonas, You have two options, have millions of small search engines that don’t do the job like we want it to, like msn, aol, yahoo, and such. Or you can have one company that controls all of it and therefore it is immaculately organized. I choose the latter because when i look for something i WANT to find it, not crawl through 2 pages of web looking for just the right one.
Mminar: Maybe the trachea example was a bit out but you get the point, don’t teach us facts that can be found out in half a minute, that are pointless to know and are used about 6 times in a lifetime. Use the time in school to train us to think not force us to memorize all day. With today’s generation: memorization is not all that important and in the future it will become less so if you like it or not!!!
And besides….google’s whole business model is based on the fact that advertisers pay for googles expenses and we get the service for free…very ingenious
Jonas said:
“[..] don’t teach us facts that can be found out in half a minute, that are pointless to know and are used about 6 times in a lifetime.”
I often give my students a puzzle which takes 30 seconds to say, and for them it would take 30 seconds to find the answer to the problem on Google. Probably 95% of them will never pass on the puzzle to anyone, but for an hour, the students are enthralled with finding the answer; navigating through their own mind, following their rules of “what makes sense” towards an answer. They grow social and logical skills that are quietly used in your life all the time. You can make anything “pointless” significant, if given the right place, the right time.
On the side … I think we have to be careful not to think that every fact that can be googled shouldn’t be memorized.(btw, I spoke to the trachea example because it was mentioned in the original post)
I can’t speak for how most teachers teach, but there are many facts in school which are used all the time in real life, without us knowing it, and teachers don’t point them out. The parabolic locus is a great example. As for mental math … it currently moving up through the grades and just being emphasized in early high school / late elementary grades and is very important, just as the original post mentioned.
For every person, there will be facts that you will use only 6 times in YOUR lifetime, but you never know … the person sitting in the seat beside you might use it 60000 times. That’s why high school seems boring a lot of the time: you’re not asked to, nor should you really master even 75% of the material. The whole spectrum of knowledge depends first on facts, then analysis, and the synthesis (creation of newer meaning) through those facts. Google, if used with a grain of salt, can be your best friend, but nowhere can you learn best than with a guide (i.e. a teacher) who can both show you how the facts are important and how to build beautiful new meaning out of them.
MM
This is in response to Kelly’s original post, and not really aimed at any of the other comments.
While I agree that our education system could do a better job of teaching critical and logical thinking skills, I emphatically disagree with the idea that schools shouldn’t teach anything that could be googled.
In order to have any kind of worthwhile discourse, you need basic general knowledge. What’s the use of giving students the critical thinking skills necessary to debate and challenge, for example, our politicians’ actions in parliament, if they don’t know how the system is supposed to work, or even know how our government is set up, or what the purpose of the three branches of government are?
To use a more specific example, I can’t have a discussion with you about the merits of different taxation systems if you’re not even aware that different ones exist, much less know what the merits and drawbacks of each are.
That’s a pretty obscure example, I’ll admit, but you have to concede the fallacy of using Google as an argument against a practical education. Despite popular belief, not everyone has easy access to a computer or the internet, and the absurdity of pausing a face-to-face conversation in order to google something should be obvious.
I would also argue that just because it’s possible to google every tiny little thing, doesn’t mean you should have to. Expecting you to acquire a basic understanding of the world around you is not asking too much.
There’s no limit to how much you can learn.
Arguably ranking among the biggest problems in western society is that people no longer think for themselves.
Spill coffee on yourself? Sue TimHortons!
See an ad? Buy without consideration of your financial standing!
A politician looks good? Vote him in!
Many of today’s problems can be linked to this type of mentality. People fail to think for themselves, to link action and consequence.
Knowing your anantomy ican be very handy when you’re a health conscious person. or discrening scams.
Most schools have bigger problems, like encouraging the athiest, etc.