The Impatience of the Google Generation

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.

[MindPrison (864299)]

Im an ex. teacher, now working in the industry instead, and I think I have an idea why they are like that - you know - incredibly impatient, demanding and everything has to be here and now! Its because they are used to it, with search engines like Google and others - not to mention modern computers with awesome search facilities gives them the power of instant knowledge, so who wants to wait given alternatives like that? We of the "older" generation are used to doing things by experience and heavy research into just about everything, and we have TRIED what they are doing now - therefor we know the difference between instant knowledge and well thought out and researched knowledge. There is a HUGE difference. But how do we change this? The truth is - we need to "tap into" that generation and show real life advantages, the young generation are far from stupid, they have aquire information differently because we have given them the oportunity to do so, and natural selection comes home.

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[JohnFluxx (413620)]

Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library 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.

I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it.

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[English French Man (1220122)]

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.

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[Mr. Underbridge (666784)]

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

[Gerzel (240421)]

Don't forget that many google searches lead to a book.

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

[ronadams (987516)]

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.

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

[kellyb9 (954229)]

Don't forget that many google searches lead to a book.

Funny... most of google searches lead to porn.

Re:Extraneous Information

[computational super (740265)]

society is progressing to the point where precise targetting is far preferred to generalization.

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

[an.echte.trilingue (1063180)]

Well, I'm just doing my master, but for my work (International Relations), they both have their value. Let's say that you are writing about the Nixon's establishment of diplomatic relations with China. You can use google and wikipedia to get an overview of opinions on the subject in the initial stages of your research, and then for fact checking later (when did the Ping-Pong team return to the States again?). Indeed, the skill to do this kind of searching is wide both spread and indispensable in modern academia.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just doing my master

I stopped reading here. Is she hot?

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[sm62704 (957197)]

I'm just doing my master

I stopped reading here. Is she hot?

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

-mcgrew

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[Larry Lightbulb (781175)]

If they say they're a man, they're a man; if they say they're a woman, they're a man; if they say they're a teenager, they're a cop.

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[TargetBoy (322020)]

The problem is that they have never seen an instance where they have needed to do what you describe. Just like most of folks have never needed to know how to skin and clean game any more.

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...

[darkvizier (703808)]

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.

[an.echte.trilingue (1063180)]

However, if you want to go beyond the superficial, the libraries ... are essential.

So, the publications of the ACM and IEEE as well as the vast databases of print journals that have been digitized that most schools and universities have access to are all superficial?

You are committing two errors with that statement:

1. You are taking my statement out of context [fallacyfiles.org].
2. You are using that misquote to build a straw man [fallacyfiles.org] argument.

Allow me to explain:

The words those three dots replace entirely change the meaning of that sentence. Look at what those three dots replace:

or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries

Clearly, I am not talking about the libraries per se, I am talking about the ability to read and understand complex and credible sources.

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:

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 [is] here. ...
...you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.

To clarify, obviously whether you read on a screen or a dead tree is irrelevant beyond personal preference. Digitizing can in fact really help the diffusion of information. However, the ability to actually read the material is what is at stake here and that is the skill I am talking about. I still maintain that this is necessary to go beyond the superficial.

Anyway, have a good one.
-mat

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[slashbob22 (918040)]

Bah.. You're doing it the hard way; almost all my thesis was written^W found via Ask Slashdot.

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[Critical Facilities (850111)]

Ah, you must be going for one of these degree programs:

BS - Bullshit
MS - More Shit
PhD - Piled High and Deep

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

But they lack the patience and the mental disciplines needed to sit down and really work out a problem.

So, this research has shown that young people are impatient and undisciplined.

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

[EB FE (1208132)]

Isn't impatience and lack of appreciation something that EVERY generation attributes to the next?

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[PastaLover (704500)]

"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 you can -research- the solution.

Doing your PhD is a doctoral degree AFAIK and thus not "school". You are not trying to solve problems someone else has solved, it's supposed to involve original research. Actually, solving problems someone else has solved is usually what you do at work, which is why the new generation won't be causing a global recession through their lack of invention skills any time soon.

Many of us in the working world deal with people who -can't- do anything other than "look it up on Google". Junior programmers, especially, who can't solve a problem unless they can swipe a code snippet from the web. Some of these eventually learn to poke randomly at the code till they find something that "sorta works".

Either you live in the wrong area of the world (i.e. India) or your company is hiring the wrong programmers. All programmers I know have a good grasp of the analytical concepts involved in writing code. Remember that these young guys is what the industry is turning on at the moment. Trying to work of snippets looked up on the internet is more common for the trade school type programmer, which may be a problem with this type of education. This also means you need to manage your junior programmers better. If they weren't taught the necessary skills you'll have to spoonfeed them. Yeah it sucks, but your company hired them in the first place didn't they?

I've spoken to nurses and doctors who say the same things about some younger medical professionals; many of them lack the mential disciplines to diagnose problems. They're reduced to trying to look things up on Google and Wikipedia, and eventually give drugs randomly to trusting human patients.

That's ridiculous. If they did that they shouldn't be a doctor at all. Considering the threat of lawsuits in this particular profession I wouldn't think any doctor that did that would last long. My experience with younger doctors is that they might not be as good at recognizing a certain problem (since they don't have the experience yet) but that they are far better up to speed (and stay up to speed) with the general state of the medical profession.

Fine; but what do you do when the information -needs- to be found; not by searching musty stacks of books, but by dissection of the problem and analysis of the elements that compose it?

So what? Then we'll dissect the problem and carry on. This post reeks of "you damn kids get off my lawn".

Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

"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 you can -research- the solution.

No. In order to be awarded a PhD, you must make 'an original contribution to the field.' If you can find a solution in someone else's work then you have not made an original contribution and thus will not be awarded a PhD.

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.

Re:

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

I guess these social scientist types derive their funding from trying to map distinctions upon each generation.
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

[Chapter80 (926879)]

I'm glad those pesky kids are impatient. They'll get off my lawn a little quicker.

i don't know

[stoolpigeon (454276)]

i'd rtfa but that page is taking forever to load.

Re:i don't know

[minginqunt (225413)]

I've got a short attention span you insens...

Ooh, look! Monkeys.

Systematic literature review

[stranger_to_himself (1132241)]

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.

Re:Systematic literature review

[Eivind (15695)]

You're being ignorant or silly. It's not possible to find "all of the available" information on any topic, and much less to be -certain- that you've found it all. Not even for tiny, specialised subjects. For larger more complex subjects, you can easily find enough information that you'd spend 10 lifetimes just reading trough it once, nevermind critically assess and synthesise anything whatsoever. Then what ?

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

[stranger_to_himself (1132241)]

You're being ignorant or silly. It's not possible to find "all of the available" information on any topic, and much less to be -certain- that you've found it all. Not even for tiny, specialised subjects. For larger more complex subjects, you can easily find enough information that you'd spend 10 lifetimes just reading trough it once, nevermind critically assess and synthesise anything whatsoever. Then what ?

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.

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.

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

[epine (68316)]

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.

Why is it that every time the term "peer review" comes up, it comes up in a sentence justifying silliness? First of all, peer review is like the patent system: at any given time, all the breaking discoveries are tied up in a secretive review process. By the time this information is actually published, it's awfully late to the party in any fast moving discipline.

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)

[stranger_to_himself (1132241)]

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

Re:Systematic literature review

[ixache (123955)]

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.

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,

Re:Systematic literature review

[SerpentMage (13390)]

Processing information has become a lost art... People don't process anymore. I see it so often with analysts, and "documentaries." They just say things and assume it is correct.

Academic Sources

[cheesethegreat (132893)]

One of the major problems here is that students are used to being able to Google "mitigating factors in murder" and get a nice website with clean design which provides them with the history and current state of the topic, all in a single easy-to-use package.

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

[shadanan (806810)]

You seem to prove a rather different point from the one set out at the onset of this discussion. Google is simply a search engine and it allows the user to find information. "Crazy Bob's Information Hut" is a specific web site which may or may not be the result of a Google search. But good and reliable sources of information might also be part of a Google search. Consider Google scholar. While I was writing my thesis, I regularly used Google scholar to find papers relating to my topic. Once I found the papers that seemed relevant, I went out and got those papers - at my university library if no electronic copy could be found. As you can see, it is possible to start with Google search and then narrow your search as you progress.

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

[delinear (991444)]

I'm not sure what you're describing is as much to do with the availability of information in the digital age as it is to do with laziness in certain students. When I read law back in the mid-to-late 90s, the internet was a new and pretty much underused tool in legal academic circles, yet there were still lazy students who relied on the minimum recommended reading list (or even worse, on their lecture notes/information sheets) to get all their information and others who read around the subject, did more in-depth research, used the recommended books and articles as a start-point for their research rather than and end-point.

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,...

[Two9A (866100)]

I don't feel myself to be a part of whatever generation the journalists want to refer to this week. I use Google, but I also read books. I use Facebook, but I also meet up with friends.

Can't we just use the technology available to us, without being branded with the [Insert Keyword] Generation tag?

Re:Facebook Generation, Google Generation,...

[Aaron Isotton (958761)]

Ah, you must be part of the "I'm not part of a generation" generation. A post-hippie, basically.

Re:Facebook Generation, Google Generation,...

[EveryNickIsTaken (1054794)]

Nah, just wait until we're in our 60's and 70's, and we can rename ourselves the "Greatest Generation." Since we'll be old and annoying, people will cut us slack and let us do that.

knowledge but not understanding

[clickclickdrone (964164)]

One of the biggest problems of being able to type in a question and have an answer (or sorts) fired back seconds later is that you become very used to dealing facts but are in danger of lacking understanding.
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.

Misconception

[Spad (470073)]

Kids may be much more at ease with computers than their parents, simply because they grew up with them, but they certainly aren't any more competent when it comes to using them. Most of my younger brother's friends (19-21 age range) struggle to do anything more than use email, Word, IM and MySpace/Facebook with a computer.

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

[QuantumG (50515)]

Most of my younger brother's friends (19-21 age range) struggle to do anything more than use email, Word, IM and MySpace/Facebook with a computer.

Uhhhh, and most of their parents struggle to do those things, therefore making your younger brother's friends more competent with computers than their parents.

Is this the byproduct of a decreasing SNR?

[Cordath (581672)]

Blogs, google-bombing advertisers, dead sites taken over by domain squatters, broken links, inaccurate wiki's... It's becoming increasingly more difficult to find good information online. Perhaps this is why the tolerance for delay and reliance on search engines is increasing across the board. (not just in them whipper-snappers!) With a lower signal to noise ratio you have to churn through more material to get what you want. That means investing less time in avenues that don't pay off fast and using search engines to avoid tedious mucking about with links that are broken as often as not. The evolution of search engines is about the only thing that is helping to combat the decreasing SNR of the web. Try searching for something specific and imagine what it would be like if you had to go back to using Lycos circa 1998!

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

[rucs_hack (784150)]

and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway

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.

Sounds sensible...

[Max Romantschuk (132276)]

Being a few years shy of thirty, I can certainly relate to this. When I was a kid the only source of information was the library, and whatever books we had at home. I remember reading about subjects that interested me and having to do a lot of research and work until I finally got results.

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.

Cat did get my tongue. Waa.

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, the elitism of knowledge is falling apart.
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. /Of course/ this will draw a lot of trash from people who've spent their whole lives learning and studying the "old way".

A note, and the main point:

[Glowing Fish (155236)]

The first obvious note to make is that this is an article about how the behavior of students doing academic research, which is why the reference to google, besides being trendy, might be a little off the mark. I think a good deal of google searches are for simple pieces of data (the phone number of the nearest Chinese restaurant), not for serious research purpose. Even wikipedia is generally consulted for simple facts (what is the population of Montreal?) rather than research as such.

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.

Who ever wrote the article

[DeeQ (1194763)]

Who ever wrote the article is obviously jealous of the fact that back in his day he had to hand write his plagiarisms and couldn't copy and paste.

"The future is now"

[vic-traill (1038742)]

Dame Lynne Brindley DBE, Chief Executive of the British Library, said of the report findings: "Libraries have to accept that the future is now. At the British Library we have adopted the digital mindset ... Turning the Pages 2.0 and the mass digitisation project to digitise 25 million of pages of 19th century English literature are only two examples of the pioneering work we are doing.

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'.

Re:Apples & Oranges

[novakyu (636495)]

Kids these days simply give up thinking the result isn't there if the search query they entered wasn't giving the result they expected.

Er, where do you get that idea? I'm not sure if I qualify as a "kid" (I'm old enough to drink legally), but when the search query does not return the desired result, the standard assumption is that the wrong keywords were specified---unless it was some kind of proper name, in which case it was either misspelled, or the result really doesn't exist, at least not in the index of the search engine being used.

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.

Re:As a 21 year old...

[sm62704 (957197)]

I feel like I'm more capable of absorbing large amounts of information from diverse sources than the last generation.

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]