Archives - Education Technology: Page 19
Author: paul carson (Mon Mar 27, 2006 3:19 am)
Title: Educational Technology
TALK of decline was old news in academia even in 1898, when traditionalists blasted Harvard for ending its Greek entrance requirement. But today there's a new twist in the story: Are search engines making today's students dumber?
In December, the National Center for Education Statistics published a report on adult literacy revealing that the number of college graduates able to interpret complex texts proficiently had dropped since 1992 from 40 percent to 31 percent. As Mark S. Schneider, the center's commissioner of education statistics, put it, "What's disturbing is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels."
The Higher Education Supplement of The Times of London reports that a British survey also finds that the ability of undergraduates to read critically and write cogently has fallen significantly since 1992. Students are not just more poorly prepared, a majority of queried faculty members believe, but less teachable.
While some blame reality television, MP3 players, cellphones or the multitasking that juggles them all, the big change has been the Web. Beginning in the early 1990's, schools, libraries and governments embraced the Internet as the long promised portal to information access for all. And at the heart of their hopes for a cultural and educational breakthrough were superbly efficient search engines like Google and those of its rivals Yahoo and MSN. The new search engines not only find more, they are more likely to present usable information on the first screen.
Google modestly declares its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." But convenience may be part of the problem. In the Web's early days, the most serious search engine was AltaVista. To use it well, a searcher had to learn how to construct a search statement, like, say, "Engelbert Humperdinck and not Las Vegas" for the opera composer rather than the contemporary singer. It took practice to produce usable results. Now, thanks to brilliant programming, a simple query usually produces a first page that's at least adequate — "satisficing," as the economist Herbert Simon called it.
The efficiency of today's search engines arises from their ability to analyze links among Web sites. Google led in ranking sites by how often they are linked to other highly ranked sites. It did so using an elaborate variation of a concept familiar in natural science, citation analysis. Instead of looking at which papers are cited most often in the most influential journals, it measures how often Web pages are linked to highly ranked sites — ranked by links to themselves.
Citation analysis has been attacked in library circles for inflating the ratings (and indirectly the subscription prices) of certain journals. Search engines have the opposite problem: dispersion rather than concentration of interest. Despite constant tweaking, their formulas display irrelevant or mediocre sites on a par with truly expert ones.
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