Article Watch: Google Books, a disaster for scholars?

Just read an interesting article/study on Google books. And while Google has reportedly fixed the errors, the article still draws attention to important issues in internet education.

article: Google Book Search: A disaster for scholars
In the Chronicle for Higher Education.

http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google’s book search is clearly on track to becoming the world’s largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google’s five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it’s safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google’s servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

To read more click here.

Theory and Practice of Online Learning: Free online book

I just found a very cool book for those interested in learning about and promoting online learning. It’s called “Theory and Practice of Online Learning” by multiple authors, though edited by Terry Anderson and Fathi Elloumi. Best of all, it’s free (supporting open source education, wow!)

Anyway, here’s the link to where you can get it: http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/

The “Google Generation” Myth: a comment

Only today I heard of the “Google Generation” (though it’s quite obvious to have an inclination to what it might mean.) And only today did I find out that according to a research team, it was a myth. The article which discusses this is found here.

The “Google Generation” is a term designated to the current crop of students/researchers who are supposedly web-wise and thus more (computer) literate. The correspondence, and false one according to the study, is to equate computer literacy with actual literacy.

The study rejects the assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ are most web-literate and claims that, “although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.”

As an educator, I have been struggling to convince the education that Microsoft Word is not a better programme just because it has grammar check. I have seen that just because people have the tools, it doesn’t help them become better students… ie. I have seen that spell check (and grammar check) actually reduces the ability of the students to spell correct.

In the same way… unsurprisingly… the extensive use of search engines for research has made researching (for me included) so easy, that we’ve become lazier.

It’s not hard to see the myth behind advertisements for buying computers (in India) that argue that children will have a better education just because the family has a computer.

It seems, therefore, that real education begins with the fundamentals… like learning to read, learning to think, learning to research… with actual books… and life.