Online research leads to narrowing focus

[Ian Carmichael]

Here's news of a study suggesting that modern, internet enabled research can devalue/ignore older articles and books, and narrow the pool of references used.
Scary if true. (True for my school students, they are in flight from printed material, indeed in flight from recommended references. For most, whatever my strategies, their first port of call is -often inanely asked - Google search.)

Any comments? Are you narrower for the internet's resources? Have you lost touch with print, extended studies and classic works? (I won't count answers from either Connie or Skip!! - ah, just kidding folks!)

[Skip Zilla]

As I see it--and I think Laura has said of her own experience several times--I have much greater access to media resources now, especially the older ones which had only sat unopened on dusty library shelves, than I did in the pre-Web days. (Sorry. I wasn't 'sposed to answer this question.)

[Daniel Kam]

Yes. Also. google books has reached agreements with author's guilds to start publishing more of the up until now unpublished and out of print works. This will be extremely important for the future of education.

[Daniel Kam]

Well. Google does limit people, but it also does something quite interesting. When you are searching for terms relative to yourself you often find what you are looking for. In other words, there is bound to be someone on some blog somewhere that agrees with you and he probably links to other similar blogs. Thus, people often start reading a few select bloggers and widen that search based on that person's blog roll. We create networks of similar minded people and we often never get beyond this network. People often start wrongly assuming that everyone in the world thinks the way they do because their network seems like the only network. We have to keep the bigger picture in mind when we are considering these types of things.

We simply have to keep assigning books and classics for our students to read. One thing that I think is wrong is that students often do all of their reading at home. They find the classic boring either because they don't like reading or they think reading is boring. We need to teach kids how to read properly. If we don't want them using sparknotes, unfortunately, the only thing we can really do is assign more of the reading to be done in class, but this does not have to be a bad thing. Rather, we can make reading fun by doing it in the classroom in an engaging way.

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks Daniel,
Related to your first paragraph:
I've just finished reading a book on self-verifying reading and its methods (selective reading of neutral materials, choice of 'my' publications, etc.) It's filled (unfortunately for me) with US centric examples, but that makes it all the more relevant for US readers. The book? True Enough. (I ordered it from the library, thinking it would be on post modernism!)
Has a nice section on fake news too (commercial firms releasing 'news items' that plug themselves or their products - and that get woven into 'real'(?) news.)

And related to your second paragraph - read, and get everyone you know to read Daniel Pennac's The Rights of the Reader as inspiration to unlock reading for the locked-out. (If it had a sub-title, it would be Down with Book Reports, I think)

I've gushed about this elsewhere on Fireside.