The Impatience of the Google Generation 366
profBill writes "As a fifty-something professor who teaches introductory computer science, I am very aware that the twenty-somethings in my class are much more at ease with computers than any other generation. However, does that mean they are more adept at using those computers? Apparently not, according to the researchers at University College London. Their research indicates that while more adept at conducting searches, younger users also show 'impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs'. Moreover, these traits 'are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors'. The panel makes two conclusions: That libraries (and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway) will have to adapt, and that the information processing skills of todays young people are lacking. Why are those skills lacking and, if they are, what can be done about it?"
Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it.
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Amen to that, almost all of the bibliography in my thesis was found via Google scholar.
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http://scholar.google.com/ [google.com]
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:4, Funny)
BS - Bullshit
MS - More Shit
PhD - Piled High and Deep
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
What needs to be taught is good research skills. Google is a good first step in well-researching something, and dependent upon someone's needs it may be the only step required.
In some ways google makes things harder to teach good research skills because google really is that good. Thus a teacher wanting to make a student do hard research must give that student a more difficult assignment to make them go off of google.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Throw some curveballs that require deeper research than just a precursory Google search, and maybe we'll get somewhere. This is a wonderful time to be training a young researcher -- because of the wealth of information out there, and how quickly so much of it can be acquired, the bar can be raised higher than ever before. Weren't computers supposed to be making us smarter, anyway? For me, at least, most of my college papers could be written with Google Scholar, except for one particular professor I had, who made his assignments so damn hard I actually had to Google and (GASP!) read some books. For that, I'm eternally grateful.
Also, I'm mad as hell someone already took my "tldr" line.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:4, Funny)
Extraneous Information (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're looking to learn all encompassingly about a subject then a book is a great way to do so. However if instead you're looking to research ju
Re:Extraneous Information (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the thing about that - I'm always reading something (it's getting harder these days to cram in "reading time" now that I have a wife and a couple of kids, but I manage to find some time to do it anyway). I read about topics I'm interested in, such as programming (right now, I'm working my way through the behemoth "Programming Python"); not necessarily to discover a specific fact or solution, but to gain general knowledge.
The result? Because I know what's going on behind the scenes, and the theory behind it all, I can usually figure out why something's gone wrong immediately, without having to flail around doing random google searches as my, um, "contemporaries" tend to do (at least as they do right before they beg me to figure it out for them).
This wouldn't bother me quite so much if it wasn't for the fact that the people who expect me to do their jobs for them regard reading books as a "waste of time". The problem with the "precise targeting", "gotta have it now, no time to research because we have to hurry up and wait" attitude is that somebody has to write the answers to those "precise target" searches. And how do you suppose they figured out how to do that?
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
By that standard, then we should also throw out the card catalog, because it might be too efficient at helping me find what I'm looking for. Let's go back to the old system I call "throw all the books on the floor and pick one at random". I bet you find all kinds of interesting information you don't need.
Others have said it, but I'll repeat it: there's a difference between the skill of searching and the search medium. Google (or another more field-apropriate search engine), used well, is a starting point - it will be much better than non-online searches. Once you find something promising, following references in the article you're reading will probably be more fruitful. Just like in the old times.
If the cranky old farts who are complaining had bothered to ask younger but somewhat accomplished researchers how they work, I bet that would be the usual system. It's what I do. I'm 30 and am in the age group that spanned the digitization of search - I'm familiar with traditional search methods. For the most part, they suck. I also have pretty good Google-fu skills, and I know that playing keyword soup all day only gets you so far. I use search engines to find a useful paper, and then use its references to find others. This method did just fine for my Ph.D. research, and now it's working for me as a professional.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
However, if you want to go beyond the superficial, the libraries (or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries) are essential. If you want to understand why things happened instead of establishing a simple chronology, you have to read Kissinger's books and memoirs, you have to read public records, you have to read contemporary journalism. It is also very helpful to read other scholars' interpretations, both in their books and journals.
Obviously, there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet, but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem here.
The problem this professor is pointing out is that people lack the ability to do this second part and go beyond the superficial because the nature of those works means that interpreting them is long and tedious and requires an attention span longer than 3 seconds. Even if digitized, you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.
So, the GP is right, IMHO, we need both theses skill sets.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Funny)
-mcgrew
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from my liberal arts classes in college, I never have used those skills in the 15 years I've been in the workplace.
The ability to find stuff very quickly on search engines is something that I need on a day-to-day basis and has had the president of my company come into my office with requests for me to find something for him.
Virtually any new business problem can be researched, overviewed, found in a highly rated book that describes the topic, one-click on Amazon with over night shipping, and read through the chapter that details how to do what you need to do.
The ability to determine the accuracy of that information, digest that research, mold it to the problem at hand, and write it effectively into proposals, designs, and code is what is useful in my job.
Unfortunately, colleges are just spitting out kids who have never really learned how to work together on a project, reuse code, or share information out of the fear that they will be called a plagiarist by some automated tool. At best their experience is limited to a "software engineering" class or internship.
The skill of being able to find things quickly is paramount in getting them up to speed in that area, because once you let them know they don't have to code EVERYTHING from scratch, they are more than happy to search code libraries for what they need.
I look forward to the day when we have coded better search engines that can search on some of the meta-properties of text rather than just the words or patterns.
The problem with this approach... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with this approach is that you can't predict the future. You don't know if some piece of your education could come in handy in the future, and by the time realization hits it could be far too late. Having a narrow understanding of the topics you're interested in makes you 1) very reliant on your source of information, 2) unable to solve permutations of problems that you've solved before. The good side of this is that you're able to pick up new things quickly.
That 1% of the time when you *do* need to know? That's when natural selection really kicks in. That 40 year old guy that you make fun of for writing checks instead of using a debit card? He's going to outperform you 10 to 1 in an unpredictable environment, because he's self reliant. He'll get paid more, have better sex, and survive more tough situations because he can adapt to what life throws at him.
You misrepresent my argument. (Score:4, Insightful)
The words those three dots replace entirely change the meaning of that sentence. Look at what those three dots replace:
You then use that misquote to suggest that my argument is that all digital sources are superficial, which is obviously an untenable position (the straw man). That is not my argument, which is clear from the rest of the post. I mentioned later regarding digitizing information:
...you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.
Anyway, have a good one.
-mat
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> and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
> I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my
> research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
"Doing your PhD" is still school, which is an artificially protected environment for the student in some ways. In school, the problems you are asked to solve in your classes are almost always problems someone else has solved, and y
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knew?
Let me get my permanent marker. I have to right that one down for posterity.
I bet, if enough research was done, we'd find out they're horny, too.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Informative)
In US universities, a PhD is typically a hybrid degree, where the first two years involve taking classes, but after this and in non-US institutions (which often don't include the taught part) the candidate is expected to write a thesis documenting their own research. The first chapter of two of this might be a literature review documenting other people's contributions to the area but all of the rest is expected to be their own solutions to whatever problem they are tackling.
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Cheap shot at the parent's PhD: if all your research can be done on Google in a few minutes, what value are you adding?
If all your research can be done just by reading other people's articles and books, you're not adding very much either, are you?
The cool thing about Google Scholar is that it lets me find citations fast (for me, it's especially useful when I know part of the info needed for the citation but need enough for a full bib entry) and in some very obscure journals indeed. I can then either use those to find the article or, often, click on a link that lets me read a digitized copy of the journal article directly f
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The next generation is still people, at least until the biochemists succeed in making substantial tweaks to the DNA.
OK, they're impatient. OK, they have some motor skill advantage from years of video games. Whoopee. Reality will temper the new generation far more than the generation tempers reality.
They're kids of the new generation - deal with it (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:2)
Amen.
Clearly, once information becomes trivial to find, at least two things will arise:
To the first: as we read (and know), Google can't really help that; education is irreplaceable. But to the second: it will be assumed that everyone can know everything. But if this is assumed, nothing my work shows ignorance of can be excused. I cannot imagine a PhD defense in the future!
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:2, Funny)
As a 21 year old... (Score:2, Interesting)
I feel like I'm more capable of absorbing large amounts of information from diverse sources than the last generation. I grew up with Google, though. Wikipedia has been around since I was about 15. Then there's IRC, Usenet, all of the forums filled with would-be experts and complete logs of conversations about more or less anything you can imagine...
The dewey decimal system is, by comparison, total bullshit. The whole notion of a physical library needs a bit of an overhaul. Integration with some sort of full
Re:As a 21 year old... (Score:5, Insightful)
That feeling comes from your inexperience. Your generation is no different than mine was when I was your age, and mine is no different from Ben Franklin's generation. The world has changed much, but people have changed little. Why did my grandfather's generation (he was born in 1896) call young folks "whippersnappers?" Because the young generation was always impatient. Back in the horse and buggy days, the way to get speed out of your transportation was to snap a whip, making the horse run faster.
Every generation of 21 year olds think its generation is different from the previous one. Every generation of 21 year olds is wrong.
-mcgrew
(PS- your generation is lousy in bed) [slashdot.org]
Apples & Oranges (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apples & Oranges (Score:5, Interesting)
But seriously, I see more older people typing in something for search result and then giving up when they don't get what they want: 1) They haven't internalized the power of Internet search engines as we have, 2) Most of them seem to have lousy keyword-picking skills.
Of course, I'm probably biased, since I haven't been around too many old people (especially not those who blazed the trail for computer science), but I still find your comment unsupported by evidence.
i don't know (Score:5, Funny)
Re:i don't know (Score:5, Funny)
Ooh, look! Monkeys.
Systematic literature review (Score:4, Interesting)
An good exercise is a systematic literature review [wikipedia.org]. You have to make sure that you don't just find some information about the topic you are interested in, but you find all of the available information, then you must critically assess each piece of literature and synthesise them properly. Each stage of the process must be justified and repeatable (so no Googling)
I'm in the middle of one of these and its really shown up my impatience to get answers. In my opinion something like this should be a part of the school curriculum, or at least a part of undergradute courses.
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Are you serious? That's pretty much impossible these days.
I think one major difference between today and pre-web is that previously, it was easy to believe that you had found "all of the available information", even if in reality you hadn't. These days, we are much more aware of how much information is out there, and how rapidly it is growning. This will become
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:5, Insightful)
There are areas where you can get a reasonable overview -- namely those areas where we know next to nothing or that interest nobody (or both!), but that is by nessecity niche.
You can't collect, read, assess and synthesise "all available information" on Computer-Science, so you migth go more narrow and do Cryptography, but that's equally impossible. So you might go more narrow and do Diffie-Hellman. Even then you could only be certain you've found the most well-known articles and research on it, there's always going to be a risk that some student in India (say) has published a paper that includes information not found anywhere else. There's no way to tell.
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:5, Insightful)
You're wrong about that. The academic indexes are good enough that you can be certain enough not to have missed anything important. If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal, and that journal will be indexed. I'm not saying it's easy, and it can take months to do right. I know the model for publication in Computer Science is different to all other academic subjects so maybe it wouldn't work there, I don't really know.
Well obviously. You only need to do this where there is a significant conflict of evidence and opinion (so you can identify where the conflicts arise), or where there isn't much evidence and it's never been collated. Otherwise Googling will work just fine.
Of course you can't review 'computer science' or 'medicine'. You have to be very specific about the question you are trying to answer. For example, you might look for information on the pattern of occurrence of a particular disease, or the effect of a particular social intervention on crime rates, or the most efficient implemenation of some algorithm. You'd maybe have to read the titles of 10000 articles, the abstracts of 1000, and the text of a hundred just to get to the four or five that will provide the important information.
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there is the cross-discipline problem. In a field such as cognitive psych, useful material can be squirreled away in pretty much any journal from the sciences or the humanities. How good is that index, really?
The more original your thesis, the less likely your useful sources are the top scoop in the peer review catalog system. The "peer review" bucket is a form of insularity, but somehow most scholars within the system manage to convince themselves that nothing from the barbarian sphere is much worthy of consideration.
This distinction would be much clearer if the world had adopted the practice that all peer review articles are published in Latin. And then when some stooped-backed doctoral acolyte pops his badly shaven head out of an ivory tower and proclaims (in Latin) that every road leads to Rome, it would be plainly evident what kind of world that person is living in.
Re:meritopolian cliquetops (3rd self reply) (Score:4, Insightful)
Your opinions are based on an expertly demonstrated misunderstanding (or possibly outdated understanding) of the system as it current stands. I cannot sufficiently communicate how distressed I am that the public perception of the academic system is the way it is. My comments on here have generally been replied to by people with only a peripheral understanding of how academic publication works, and with a lot of hostility, possibly fuelled by a single unfortunate encounter with a journal editor at some point in the past. I don't know where the suspicion for academics comes from. We're not in it for the money, I could earn three times as much as I do working for a pharmaceutical company somewhere. Most of us never get any public recognition. Most of us do what we do because it's interesting, and we like finding out stuff, and sharing our findings with the world. The ultimate reward in my group is some kind of public dissemination of our findings, or a positive policy change that comes out of something we do.
The very fact that my comments, coming from a position of actual knowledge and experience can be refuted with, and I chose the word carefully, lies, and those lies be highly rated by people who want to believe them and don't know any better, confirms my view that a more rigorous system of arbitration needs to be in place in this world where anybody can post anything and the layman in his ignorance is expected to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I include myself as an ignorant layman when it comes to any area outside of my expertise. I want to be able to find information that has been vetted by people who know what's what, not stuff that's highly ranked because it's good emotive rhetoric (see the parent post - paedophile priests, good analogy), or is confirming somebody else's prejudices.
For example, despite all our efforts, and the mountain of evidence to the contrary, there are still people who write that MMR causes autism, or that smoking prevents AD (recently modded 5 informative on Slashdot no less). Neither of these things is true. But of course nobody listens to us, because we're boring, and are cautious not sensationalist.
Peer review has far more to do with the arbitration of career advancement than quality control over factual content. Much like the Vatican, which can't even toss out a pedophile from among the shepherdship, at least not until their coffers were crucified by rattus legalis.
Not when I do it, it isn't. I'm personally offended by that statement. I review a lot of things, and 90% of the time I don't know and cannot guess who has written them. I judge articles for quality and for relevance. Badly executed research I send back, badly written or badly interpreted research I try to help with.
In my mind it is not possible that the younger generation will sprout their wings under the ultraviolet Google grow lamp and not beat a retreat from stodgy formal journals like midges from a puddle of turpentine. A few dutiful brown-nosers will fall for the ruse of progress-within. That faint rustling sound that haunts their sleep at night is their less dutiful peers munching their way through the rafters of stone age sweat lodges; the pink and grey eminents within are just beginning to notice some chill eddies.
Your right, the system is crumbling - and we'll be much poorer for it. For example the vast amounts of unsupported gibberish being published by political groups in the UK and the US is leading to policy shifts in favour of screening for many diseases, despite a medical consensus that it is not needed and is potentially harmful. None of this crap has gone through peer review by epidemiologists or research clinicians, but the press love it, and the politicians see votes, and the mob demand it on radio phone in shows, so it is done. Research clinicians can only look on and weep as the carefully collected and controlled evidence is tossed aside in favour of some fervent blogger who dem
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True; they will contain everything that is -ALREADY- recognized as being important. But that doesn't help you much; that just tells you the stuff that the scientific community already agrees is important.
Much more interesting is the stuff that -IS- important, but which isn't recognized as such yet. That can be so for a multitude of reasons ranging from plain misunderstanding and to the work not yet being read by anyone with enough expertise to recog
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't want to argue with you, but this excerpt made me think about the great Donald E. Knuth [stanford.edu], whose story is well known: in the 60's, he devised the lofty project of writing a set of books about algorithms, that would be the definitive and comprehensive source of knwoledge about this topic. It is the famous and acclaimed The Art of Computer Programming.
All is fine, except that the level of detail and perfection that Dr. Knuth set himself to pursue led him to search for every piece of information about algorithms that could included in his books, and also to invent an idealized assembler (twice, MIX then MMIX) to get a feel "how it really works concretely", to program his own typesetting system, the great TeX (twice, first in Pascal then in C) --and to invent by the side his own programming methodology, literate programming (which has never caught on)-- and to revise accordingly his first three volumes once or twice each.
Now, forty years later, the wealth of knowledge about algorithms has grown exponentially, to the point that no one man could know all about it, and he is nowhere near the completion of his initial goal. Moreover, the workload he has currently assigned himself to complete unfortunately seems to require a longer time than his expected remaining lifetime (he was born in january 1938). And there are not many things more disheartening than seeing someone dying too early to achieve his lifetime Graal...
Sorry for being glum and offtopic,
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But there is an even more important point here - Google generation has obviously decided that it's much more efficient to look at the result of such systematic literature review done by someone else (or by go
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is because the rise of infotainment targeted to the consumer class has displaced news targeted to the middle class, so "documentaries" remain as the only mass market vehicle left with which to disseminate news. It used to be the case that 10 minutes of 20 minute news program could be dedicated to something factual and potentially politically relevant (e.g. the Vietnam War, civil rights protests), now th
Academic Sources (Score:5, Insightful)
In contrast, academic articles are usually much narrower in scope than your average webpage and require much more reading and time before an understanding of the subject can be cultivated. Of course, the benefit of using academic articles is that after having read a dozen of them, a student will have a much better and more balanced understanding of a subject than they would have if they'd just gone to Crazy Bob's Information Hut.
When I peer-review papers (I'm currently in law school), it's very obvious which students started their research with academic sources, and which started on Google. The problem can be quickly solved by professors taking the approach seen at my institution: students failing to have in-depth research on the topic get poor marks.
Re:Academic Sources (Score:5, Insightful)
More than likely, all the students that you peer reviewed started their research with Google. The more intelligent among them however, went the extra mile and found good sources when they wrote their papers. This is not new. Intelligent people will always write good papers by doing the research that is necessary. In our generation however, we have access to more sophisticated tools than previous generations for finding information. We have Google search and the Internet as well as online libraries. The previous generation had references, the Dewey Decimal System and card catalogs.
I am glad though, that your university fails students that don't do in-depth research. I would be quite surprised otherwise.
Re:Academic Sources (Score:4, Insightful)
Of my peers at the time, I was one of the few who utilised the internet as much as possible (admittedly there were far fewer legal resources online back then), but again I would use it to lead me down different avenues of research, to give me a much broader understanding of the subject at hand. I saw it as one more source to add to books, case reports, articles, etc. Now, of course, a lot of the information from those other sources is available online - this is merely a more convenient format to allow research, it doesn't prevent the more studious from doing extensive research.
At the end of the day, if a lazy student only has the option of reading books and articles, he will read the bare minimum he needs. If we give him the option of the internet, he will visit the bare minimum of sites he needs to get the same information. The issue here is with motivating students to _want_ to do the additional research, not with criticising the tools of said research.
Facebook Generation, Google Generation,... (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't we just use the technology available to us, without being branded with the [Insert Keyword] Generation tag?
Re:Facebook Generation, Google Generation,... (Score:5, Funny)
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You can make a post into a hippie? What are YOU on, hippie?
-mcgrew
PS: something just happened that happens daily that refutes Professor Bill's entire thesis. Now, rememeber I'm a 55 year old geezer. So what do I seee almost daily at slashdot, where all of the admins are young enough to be my kids?
Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair
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Generations are just another way to express prejudice.
Personally, I get immense satisfaction out of being prejudiced against prejudiced people.
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Re:Facebook Generation, Google Generation,... (Score:5, Funny)
knowledge but not understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when we relied more on books, you'd often go through several books and many pages looking for something and along the way see all manner of peripheral information on the subject which over time builds in to a much broader grasp of the subject and a better basis for joining the dots and developing understanding.
I suspect that in the unlikely event that the web disappeared overnight, we'd have a whole generation or two of apparantly 'smart' people floundering badly.
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It is
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Which is in itself a problem. What if everyone starts relying on say Wikipedia and then that site goes? There are many areas of study that has one or two really good web resources and a whole bunch of also-rans. Most books exist in hundreds if not thousands of copies around the world. If a major website goes, it's knowledge is potentially lost forever along (archive.com notwithstanding).
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You might be able to lookup the value of e on the Internet. You might be able to immediately lookup what the derivative is for a given function. But, regardless of what generation you belong to, knowing the value
you still have the other kind of people (Score:2)
What you are talking about is people who can solve things fast with just some searches on the internet, you can solve highly specialized problem with out almost no prior knowledge and no needs for smarts.
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It discussed if that was actually a problem in itself i.e. as long as you have an answer, does it matter that you don't know how to get it? I'd say ye
Well.. (Score:2, Funny)
Misconception (Score:5, Insightful)
They like using computers, they're certainly not afraid of computers (like some people are), but they don't have any desire to learn how to use a computer beyond simple tasks (and they certainly don't have the patience to most of the time).
Re:Misconception (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this the byproduct of a decreasing SNR? (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, ease of searching is just one of the many reasons why libraries should be digitizing their collections. How many times have you found a book that looked absolutely perfect for what you're doing, only to find that it's loaned out, damaged or defaced, returned but not reshelved, lost, etc.. Also, it's just plain more convenient to be able to pull up some text from the comfort of your couch rather than trekking into the library. That convenience adds up if it's something you access regularly. e.g. Who goes to the library to read paper journals these days?
libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably they will change into (back into) the original model provided by the great library of Alexandria. That institution held books (ok, scrolls), but was primarily a place of teaching, effectively its role was what we now see as the role of a university.
Libraries only became dull(yes, dull) with the advent of the new breed of privately funded library in the eighteenth century (I omit centuries of Islamic libraries, I know little of them, other then they were active and very full). Certainly this was the case in England, and I'm pretty sure the US has its share of privately initiated libraries. Those libraries were focused heavily on the collection of knowledge, and did indeed help many people learn new things, but the visitor was expected to remain solemnly quiet, to absorb the information and depart, not disturbing others engaged in the ritual of learning.
Pretty boring stuff for a great proportion of the population (not me, I like libraries, but I'm not talking about myself). Information does not do well sat in books, it needs to be experienced, talked about, it should 'live'. That was Micheal Faraday's idea, and he gave weekly science lectures as well as doing science, inspiring many to seek further knowledge. The Internet brings us some measure of liveness for our information as well, which stimulates interest, but for the most part its short term. You find what you want, or don't, and move on fast.
A library should include the Internet, and books, but also staff who teach, providing some means of focusing people on the knowledge that they have become however fleetingly interested in. Without that you're unlikely to have a library that does anything but collect dust and books.
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In Finland: Not dull. (Score:3, Informative)
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impatience is a virtue (Score:2)
Studies like this always start out by assuming things about young people, only to find out they know nothing. How is that a surprise ? Gee, teenagers don't pay attentio
Sounds sensible... (Score:3, Interesting)
These days I find myself being very annoyed if I can't find information that I need. Growing up as the web evolved sort of helps me see how I've changed myself. My work (R&D) depends on finding information quickly. At home I have very little free time (small kids), and I'm very annoyed whenever I fail to find the information I need. Don't even get me started on what happens when I have no internet connection at home...
Oddly, being netless is not much of a problem for me when I go to the summer cottage for example, I still seem to have the ability to detach properly. I suspect people 5-10 years younger than me may not do so well under similar circumstances.
Research Methods (Score:2, Insightful)
Find your chosen subject in wikipedia, open all of the sources and briefly scan them while following links to their sources. Within minutes you have a plethora of information at your fingertips. For many students this is enough to provide all t
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That's no different from the way it used to be: any reasonably smart person trying to figure out a new domain would first go to simple, easy-to-understand survey articles.
One of the most important resources for serious science used to be Scientific American.
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When someone can easily write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of in one night and still get an A, there is a big problem.
I'm not sure that statement is entirely correct. If the person can write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of and still fail to properly comprehend, then there is a big problem. On the other hand, if access to information has reached a level where a person can get a good grasp of a subject quickly and put that
Cat did get my tongue. Waa. (Score:3, Insightful)
Old profs that have taken a long degree, where half the time it wasn't really the understanding of the subject that made it hard - but simply gathering the information in the first place and then processing it; aren't too keen about all of it suddenly being as common knowledge as anything else.
A lot of people love (as an example) wikipedia. A lot of profs love wikipedia. Quite a few hate the fact that it's making knowledge less restricted, and less potentially "streamlined" into one 'channel' that everyone has to go through to get it.
It isn't really an issue.
People aren't learning less, they're learning more. They're not anymore impatient about it than any other generation that was faced with unecessarily increased "downtime" of any sort.
This, what we're seeing now, is essentially an evolutionary step in knowledge, learning and sharing.
The new generation simply isn't stuck with the same crap the elder generations were, and they're gonna be damned if they'll be forced to "slow down" when there is no need to.
Kids today, growing up, can learn pretty much anything about everything without ever having to expend a resource other than their time and their minds attention.
A little bit of knowledge can be worse than none (Score:3, Insightful)
There are 4 stages to understanding something:
If you're at stage 2-4, then it can be extremely frustring to run into someone at stage 1, because usually such people are like a cup that's completely full. No room for anything.
Do you really think a prof (probably at stage 2-4) is afraid that they'll be made redundent by google, or is more like they're annoyed by
A note, and the main point: (Score:3, Insightful)
The main point is, I think that students naturally become impatient when dealing with data, because there is so much out there. I certainly do. But there is a big difference between how data and knowledge are gained. If I am dealing, say, with a glossy pdf full of buzzwords and generalities, I will gloss over it impatiently. If I find something that is full of actual knowledge, and concepts that aren't described in bullet points, I can be very patient while reading it.
Its more a matter of contridiction, frustration... (Score:2)
Computer power has greatly increased over the years but the user experience does not parallel that, but instead pretty much stays the same,
More data is being transfered over the internet today and its increasing with the drive towards digital tv access. I recall when I was told that the phone line couldn't handle anything more than 96k baud rate. But today we have far faster dsl and can still
Two conclusions (Score:2, Insightful)
2) The acceptable delay depends on expectations, which again depends on what the norm is.
When access to information becomes faster, people also expect access to information to be faster (duh!), and are thus less tolerant of delays, even if the delays are within what used to be the norm.
These changing norms affects younger people faster than older people, as younger people have less mental baggage to carry around.
Oh, and bonus point:
3) Books are technically obsolete
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Yes. Mental inertia. I know it well :)
This is true for some subjects, not so much for others.
In the days before the internet, the library was the only place I knew of to get the specs for this chip or that cpu. Sometimes they had it, but whatever books they did h
The Future of Libraries (Score:2)
I see two roles for libraries in the future:
Sorry (Score:2)
Evolution (Score:2)
Who ever wrote the article (Score:5, Funny)
just because... (Score:2, Funny)
"The future is now" (Score:4, Informative)
In other news, the CEO of the British Library was found drifting in a tear in the time/space continuum, disoriented and incapable of understanding that digitising shit in 2008 does not make one a pioneer.
Seriously, who writes this stuff? From the headline (Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth) to the sponsor's announcement of the study (adopted the digital mindset), the study is so wrapped in hyperbole that I just can't take it seriously.
And reading it is bad enough - I'd rather poke my eye out with a sharpened stick than click on the audio link to the 'Launch Event'.
News at 11 (Score:2)
not getting any search result back (Score:2)
The reported research doesn't match the article. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read the actual article, the researchers came to the conclusion that the whole idea that the "google generation" is more impatient with results and expects no delay was not actually backed up with evidence (p. 17 of the pdf).
old vs. new (Score:3, Informative)
Digitization of actual content came later. When I started graduate school in 1998, I can still remember going to the old, crusty "bowels" of the health sciences library and looking up academic journals by hand -- it was really a royal PITA because the amount of journal articles you'd have to look up was quite astronomical, and you'd have to take several trips between your table/desk in the library and the shelf, to work on a given problem. But we found the information we needed.
By the time I graduated however, it got much better! The ACS put their entire archives since the 1800s online [acs.org], and several other publishers got into that game as well. So now, you could search online and find the info you needed as well. The problem (that still remains, unfortunately), is that publishers are still clinging to their old, archaic copyright policies, and if your institution doesn't have access, you get a page asking you to pay. And the fees, for single articles, are astronomically effing ridiculous -- $50 or so for a single article!!!! Who in the h*ll is going to pay for that?!?! I understand that publishers do need to make a certain amount of money, within reason. Although I don't buy their justification of publishing costs -- these days, the typesetting is all done in desktop word processing, by the authors! And authors are asked more and more to do actual editorial tasks. Peer review doesn't even cost as much, since the experts don't get paid to do it. So the journals asking for $50 or so for a single article are just extorting people for far too much than they should actually be charging! Fortunately, it looks like the academic publishing market is slowly moving more in the direction of open access.
Wait a second... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me get this straight. Imagine someone looking for specific documented information regarding their . They search google. They visit a site. They quickly scan the site. They don't see clues that specific information is located on that site (for right now, assume it is). The user leaves the site, goes back to google, and looks at the next promising linked site.
So explain to me why is this the fault of the user for abandoning the site? Sounds to me like the kids have it right on. Don't make excuses for websites. Not for their navigation, taxonomy, folksonomy, whatever. Especially so when there are millions of other sites trying to serve me that same content.
Note: Bonus points goes to people that understands that not making excuses for systems is the meta answer
You're trolling, right? (Score:2)
But if you come by your lousy spelling honestly, then I certainly applaud your scholastic efforts, and would only add that it takes all types to turn the world --and that none of the types you mention need to be labeled with antagonism. Why on earth should there by any kind of war between the various classes of passion in the halls of learning?
-FL
Re: Improved ... (Score:2)
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