John Tarrant on search technology and higher education
I was once Googled by the chief executive's office of a leading global company as a briefing for the senior management. The briefing, which I only saw after the event, indicated that I was resident in California and an expert in Zen Buddhism, rather than a UK vice-chancellor with a background in environmental science. Such mistakes should teach us how vulnerable students are.
Navigators are urgently needed. In our information society the so-called "Google generation" has grown up with vast amounts of information available at the click of a mouse. Most of this information is contradictory and much is wrong. Sometimes the errors are fairly benign but often they are not. Information does not lead automatically to knowledge, let alone wisdom.
The Google generation presents great challenges to the academic profession. There are exciting experiments underway to tackle them. Some will be showcased at the conference "Dazzling Technologies: Seismic shifts in higher education in a fast changing and unequal world", organised by the Association of Commonwealth Universities in Hyderabad.
Academic staff, and their library colleagues, are changing from being gatekeepers of information, releasing what it is considered a student needs to know, to navigators through the increasingly complex landscape of information. Libraries are not just another student service or a building full of computers. They are in partnership with academic staff both to enable information to be made available and, importantly in the academic endeavour of marshalling and mediating that information into knowledge. As such they are as much at the heart of a university today as they were in medieval times.
I have just conducted a Google search for "Jihad" which indicated 16,200,000 hits. The first and the fourth gave the following definitions:
"Jihad means to strive or struggle. Striving in the way of Allah and struggle in the way of God or to struggle to improve oneself and/or society"
"Jihad is holy war. Or more precisely: It means the legal, compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims at the expense of territories ruled by non-Muslims. Jihad is unabashedly offensive in nature, with the eventual goal of achieving Muslim domination over the whole globe"
Both are fully referenced and footnoted entries and appear equally authoritative. The high ranking of these sites means that they are well linked to others and are exceptionally well used. I have little doubt that a further search of the leading entries would have produced many more equally contradictory definitions. Whereas the student 30 years ago might have been referred to a limited number of definitive sources, today they have access to millions of unmoderated sites.
"Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" (T S Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', I)
Just carrying out that search could well have led to my being questioned under the US Patriot Act so who really controls access to the information? In the 1998 a Vice-Chancellor in the UK was threatened by the police bringing a case to the Crown Prosecution Service under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act as a result of including a book of Robert Mapplethorpe's photography among the art and design collection of his university library. Such limitations to freedom of access to information have been replaced by the antiterrorism legislation that seeks to question and limit student access to certain websites and to restrict access to some scientific journals (online or otherwise) by graduate students from "high risk" countries.
Has freedom of information become more or less limited as result of its abundance online? Much of the high quality information is restricted to those with identification and passwords. Not only does that limit access but it also allows monitoring and control in unprecedented ways.
On most contentious issues websites represent highly partisan views. A Google search for genetically modified foods produces 779,000 hits and in the first five juxtaposes an entry from Greenpeace which begins "The introduction of genetically modified foods has been a disaster ..." with one from the Food and Drink Federation which takes a strongly positive view.
Very few sites try to provide the synthesis which is at the heart of academic study. We leave that to the students!
· John Tarrant is Secretary-General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. The ACU's conference "Dazzling Technologies: Seismic shifts in higher education in a fast changing and unequal world" runs from 28-30 November 2008 in Hyderabad, India. http://hyderabad2008.acu.ac.uk/