Reflection on our first lab day

[First lab day you introduced strategies for searching Google--quotation marks, site:, and key words; students played the Google game]

Reflecting back, Ann, you mentioned that you noticed that even after this first introduction, some students continued to revert back to their old ways, putting long, complete sentence questions into the search field rather than trying out key words or any of the other tools from the handout. [Note: I need to get a copy of this handout to post on the web literacy blog. It's a great piece.] Many students are trying some of the new techniques, but others are hard-core when it comes to sticking with their old search strategies.

I suspect that they will continue to do so until their old search method fails them. When they try their search method and find results--even though the results are not very good--they stick with what they've been doing up 'til now: simply typing in what they want to know.

I also suspect that this is how they think of the Internet: not as a huge data base to be searched but, instead, as a place one goes to get answers (in the model of Ask Jeeves and ask.com). That is, they see the purpose of the internet as being the answerer to their (or, to be more precise, their teachers') questions. It's like asking the genie! To give up this search method would also mean to give up this mental model--this metaphor--for the web.

Again, until the old methods totally fail these users, I'm not sure they'll invest the energy in trying to learn these new methods. Because Google's search is so "smart," it's able to pick out the key words from kids' questions and do OK (sometimes) without much else. Of course, as the searches get more complex, this won't work as well...but it still SEEMS to work, and that's the key. It's hard to unlearn an old habit.

Here's what we need, I think:

What if we made a presentation that went something like this:

1. Put a long question into Google and see what results come up.

2. Then pull key words from this question and do the search; see what you get.

3. Then use some of the techniques (quotation marks, plus sign, minus sign, etc.) and see what comes up.

4. Then use the site: function and see what comes up.

We'd have to stage this "demonstration" carefully so as to illustrate that method 4 really does get better results than method 1, but, if we could do it right, it might be powerful.

The more I play with Google, the more I feel as if there are a ton of shortcuts and techniques that I'm only beginning to know about. I wonder what sorts of Google guides there are out there.

Some resources I'll try to check out:

1. http://www.googleguide.com/
2. http://www.googletutor.com/google-manual/
3. http://hcl.harvard.edu/research/guides/google/
4. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1264/12-Quick-Tips-To-Search-Google-Like-An-Expert.aspx
5. Google for Dummies (book)