Journal 1

Your google guide. Johnson, D. (2007) Learning & leading with technology, 34 (8), 25-26

This article is a basic, bare-bones introduction on how to use google's search engine. For somebody who is new to the world of the internet, the article would be very useful. It would also be useful for teachers who want to introduce their students to using google to help with their assignments.

Although there is a some focus on education, there is general interest for everyone. These days, almost everyone uses google to do their searching, but most people probably don't do much more than writing two or three words as their search query (a statistic given in the article shows that 50% of all google searches are in this category). For me, the most useful section of the article was on use of operators, because I learnt something new - the use of the minus sign. If a minus sign is placed before a word, results containing that word are omitted. Another technique that he mentions is use of quotation marks enclosing a string of words to find that exact sequence of words. This is very useful is you are looking for a specific article and you know an exact sequence of words from that article, e.g. from a journal or newspaper.

In the educational setting, frequent use of operators such as these would help ensure that initial results are more refined and appropriate.

2 questions/answers:
1. How can we ensure that students don't cheat on assignments by just googling for everything? This is easy to answer - it's always possible to set questions where instead of answers being readily available by a simple internet search there is some thought process, reflection, or research that has to be done to answer the question. For example, a set of calculations or numerical problems might require a google search to learn how to approach the problem.

2. Is the availability of information on the internet always a help to learning? No - there is huge potential for distraction.Using of the internet speeds up the time required to gather information, but can be a huge waster of time of the student gets distracted.