Google: First try or last resort?

I have two full disclosures (confessions?) for this blog. First, this article was inspired by Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google making us stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains,” in the July/August edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Secondly, to find a copy of the article, I Googled the title. I was unable to access the article that way, so I then turned to our Minuteman Library Network and obtained a copy from the Academic One database.

This week in my seventh grade technology class, I projected the title of Carr’s article and asked students what they thought he meant. Their responses were many and included:
*We don’t go into a book or a library to look things up. We just go to Google.
*It’s spending too much time not thinking – everything is right in front of you.
*Google makes it too easy to forget things. When I didn’t remember how to do my math homework, I used Google.
*Some of the sources you find on Google won’t be true.
*(It’s) Giving us the wrong idea about what you want to know – it could be written by anybody.

I was intrigued to hear their perceptions about Googling. While all their thoughts about the title probably are true, Carr’s argument in the article is that our overuse of the Internet for reading is causing changes in the way our brains function.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski (Carr, 2008).

Although I am a heavy user of the Internet for news and information (see disclosure above), I am a firm believer in moderation. I believe that one can adjust his/her reading style depending on the purpose of the reading. I also believe that research and reading non-fiction does involve more skimming than immersing oneself in a novel. That being said, students growing up online should be taught explicitly how and when to use different styles of reading.

So we are going to spend some time in our classes skimming, reading, and comparing research results from Google and from our library databases. My first goal for students is that they are able to judge for their own research purposes when to use Google as a first try or last resort. Secondly, and just as importantly, I want students to learn when to skim and when to read deeply.

Which method do you use when Googling? First try or last resort?

S. Sicard