върху учениците и студентите, или стават ли те по-глупави във времето на интернет? Ню Йорк Таймс, позовавайки се на американско и британско изследване, дава положителен отговор. Не само по-малко знаят, но и по-малко подлежат на обучение, показват изследванията. И не могат да интерпретират Пруст. Разбира се, българските ученици и студенти нямат този проблем, от тях изобщо не се изисква да интерпретират Пруст.
By EDWARD TENNER
Published: March 26, 2006
Plainsboro, N.J.
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.
Curious
about the academic field of world history? A neophyte would find little
help entering "world history" in Google. When I tried, the only article
on the world history movement, from the open-source Wikipedia project,
didn't appear until the fifth screen and was brief and eccentric,
erroneously dating the field from the 1980's. (In fairness to
Wikipedia, that entry has since been corrected and improved; moreover,
the paid-access Encyclopaedia Britannica site has no specific article
at all.) Only on the seventh screen did I find the World History
Network site, financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities,
and it is not yet a good portal for beginners.
Many students seem
to lack the skills to structure their searches so they can find useful
information quickly. In 2002, graduate students at Tel Aviv University
were asked to find on the Web, with no time limit, a picture of the
Mona Lisa; the complete text of either "Robinson Crusoe" or "David
Copperfield"; and a recipe for apple pie accompanied by a photograph.
Only 15 percent succeeded at all three assignments.
Today,
Google may have expedited such tasks, but the malaise remains. In the
February newsletter of the American Historical Association, the
reference librarian Lynn D. Lampert notes the prevalence of
"ill-conceived (or often nonexistent) student research practices." As
another university librarian, Pamela Martin, observed, "Google's
simplicity and impressive search prowess trick students into thinking
they are good all-around searchers, and when they fail in library
searches, they are ashamed as well as confused."
Higher education
is fighting back. Librarians are teaching "information literacy" and
establishing alternative Web indexes. Graduate students, in the front
lines as teaching assistants, are starting to discuss joining Wikipedia
rather than fighting it, as many instructors still, quixotically, do.
Can
better information in the classroom produce the literate, numerate
society the Web once promised? There are two ways to proceed. More
owners of free high-quality content should learn the tradecraft of
tweaking their sites to improve search engine rankings. And Google can
do more to educate users about the power — and frequent advisability —
of its advanced search options. It would be a shame if brilliant
technology were to end up threatening the kind of intellect that
produced it.
Edward
Tenner, the author most recently of "Our Own Devices: How Technology
Remakes Humanity," is working on a book about positive unintended
consequences.
