Group items tagged

"You'd think that with all their Googling to find the Spark Notes of the novels they didn't read, today's students would understand how the search engine works. Wrong: They are completely clueless! In a detailed study of 30 college students by anthropologists at Illinois Wesleyan, only seven were able to do a "reasonably well-executed search." According to Inside Higher Ed: They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.) Duke and Asher said they were surprised by "the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school." Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies, Asher told Inside Higher Ed in an interview."

Serco Group - the largest company you've never heard of

"As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy. "