“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.
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