Sam Harrelson

“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.

Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.

Interesting piece here on how Google and engineers are attempting to learn from the "discovery" based model that teens and children often employ as a starting point for their homework or search engine experiences.

Personally, I think we do a great disservice to our students by not encouraging them to use Google, Wikipedia, etc as a part of their learning process.

Rather than walling off these resources, it's our job as teachers to position homework or questions in such a way to encourage discovery via a number of avenues including Google, Wikipedia, personal reflection, "wisdom" (or lack thereof) of the masses, niche web communities, etc.

Knowing how to search (both on Google and in the rest of life) will increasingly be a valuable skill that we should be better cultivating in our schools.

The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans.

Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th. Both YBCA and Apple declined to comment.

January is going to be an expensive month for lots of gadget geeks if Apple does start selling the famously-rumored Tablet at this announcement.

Maybe they'll hold off until a June sell to give the early adopters time to pay off credit card bills (or maybe Google will offer the Nexus One for free in exchange for creepy targeted advertising?).

With CES, the GPhone and now the Apple event, January is shaping up to be a big month.

I'm excited about the future of web identification. This is the blueprint for sure.

Back in the day you could, given somebody's email address, type finger email@example.com and get some information about that person, whatever they wanted to share: perhaps their office location, phone number, URL, current activities, etc.

The finger protocol, sadly, died.

Fast-forward to Web 2.0. We're currently bickering about how we do interop between all these social web services, and even how we represent a person's identity. The two main identity identifer camps are email addresses and URLs.

In another year, we'll all be back to using this forgotten standard.

VAX and gopher next up for resurrection?