Remember when there was the whole "calculators in class" argybargy back when wideleg jeans were out before they were in again but after the second time they were out? Well, Lord Goog may be setting up a similar non-mathematical quandary:
One of the more experimental products was called Google Squared, which will go public in the next month or so. It takes information from the web and displays it in a spreadsheet in "split seconds", something Ms Mayer said would normally take someone half a day to do. During the demonstration, a query for "small dog" was typed into the search box. Seconds later a table popped up showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, weight and height in a clear and simple layout.
Sounds like homework done in a snap to me. Of course, on one level this is good and really just a tabular representation of a results sheet that drags information from Google images, news and general web searches. And it will demonstrate the importance of gathering and sorting different classes of data into useful format. But it will also carry the air of authority so that there will be tension with the idea of improving on Google's presentation as well as the problem of knowing to what degree the analysis presented is purely based on Google and what is the individuals.
Should we care? Should figuring stuff out and digging for information be valued even if the results are a bit like a nine year old's take on a pancake breakfast, messy and less than appetizing?
Comments
Renee - May 13, 2009 9:52 AM
I'm undecided about this.
1) It's friggin awesome. But
2) It removes the "fringe info" and slightly related facts that you pick up when researching, which is half the benefit
On the other hand, one of the most lacking skills in post-sec students is how to research. They just can't do it. You won't believe me until you see it, but learning about card catalogues and taxonomy seems to have enabled my generation to at least know how to pick keywords and find diverse and unusual sources. Not so for many of the kids coming in these days (...get off my lawn!) This will remove some of the need to develop those skills for the 'net.
On the third hand (hmm) they've had Google for ten years and their skills still suck, so maybe it wasn't teaching them anything anyway in which case, well, it's just one more Internet technology that teachers have to talk about when handing out assignments (no Wikipedia sources; no Encarta sources; no Google Squared, unless you use these to find original sources and read those...)
I'm going to come down on the side of it being cool simply because it makes information usable..er and perhaps will uncover visually some relationships that you have to sort of piece together yourself. It will really depend on the quality, I guess, but search grammar is a huge and increasingly intimidating field of computer science which is frankly getting spooky in its accuracy, so it probably won't suck.