What we need is a generation of “free range searchers”!

There is always some danger that events and people from history will be sanitized, disneyfied, cleaned up and distorted by standard resources. In contrast, in some cases, as with Isadora Duncan, when lives were controversial, the person’s stumbling may become the focus, the details of her death by strangulation grabbing more attention than her contributions to the field of dance. The celebrities may be turned into icons, or they may be scandalized.

The chapter began with physical wandering but that was intended as a metaphor for research that turns down alleys and explores unusual neighborhoods. In order to resist the formulations and the information packages that dominate many of the current resources, the researcher peers around corners and unwraps the packages.

Looking for a rich menu

While search engines like Google tend to compress and simplify findings for someone like Isadora Duncan, there are others that offer far more complexity and choice. Raroi.com (also known as “Search the Tail”) offers 55 keywords for Isadora Duncan compared to Google’s nine.

This list points the researcher in directions that are quite intriguing. Unlike Google’s short list, this list offers a rich selection, many of which might not have come to mind—like Ruth St. Denis.

Seeking the context

It turns out that researchers may often lack the context for whatever issue, person or question they are exploring. Most search engines will amplify this problem by taking us swiftly to the central search item, but search engines like Qwiki.com are eager to share related information that helps to supply the missing context. In the case of Isadora Duncan, Qwiki suggests the following related people and topics:

Unless you lived through part of that century and followed the celebrities of those years, most of these names would be unknown to you, yet they were important to understanding the life of Isadora Duncan. If one cannot take the time to understand the dance, theater, and personalities of those years, one cannot hope to understand a complex person like Isadora Duncan. For that matter, when you click on the link to modern dance, Qwiki offers a menu of dance-related links without which one could hardly understand modern dance.

As well as Mary Wigman and Loie Fuller!

Once these links appear, it becomes apparent that a huge amount of background information is missing without which one cannot hope to understand the time period, let alone any one individual who was a celebrity during those years. Our new technologies allow us to zoom in almost too easily, missing so much context.

Escaping excessive guidance

During these years of increasingly powerful search engines, individuals must learn to broaden their array of search tools to guard against excessive guidance. As Schroeder, Smith and Welch-Boles suggest in their workshop presentation:

Google and Bing dominate the search engine marketplace, but they are not the only —and in some cases not the best —research tools available. We will examine the range of Internet search tools that are available with an emphasis on those that will best serve those in education. Unique engines such at Touch Graph, Exalead, RaRoi, Blinkx, Wolfram Alpha, Internet Archive, and the Good Search Engine may not be household terms, but these and others have unique, useful qualities for those searching the Web.

sloanconsortium.org/conferences/2011/et4online/alternative-search-strategies-education

Another good source to understand the choices available for more divergent searching is the blog Beyond Google, Bing & Yahoo: Search Engine Alternatives at alternatesearch.blogspot.com, produced by one of the presenters mentioned above, Ray Shroeder. This blog helped to inspire much of the earlier content in this chapter.

The bubble

Just as tourists often experience a cultural bubble when visiting other cities and countries as mentioned earlier in this book, Eli Pariser warns that a bubble may restrain our searching on the Internet.

In “When the Internet Thinks It Knows You,” published on May 22, 2011 in The New York Times, Eli Pariser of Moveon.org claims that search engines are starting to tailor search results to what they think the individual should know about the subject they are exploring— taking the concerns of this chapter forward in an Orwellian sense:

By now, we’re familiar with ads that follow us around online based on our recent clicks on commercial Web sites. But increasingly, and nearly invisibly, our searches for information are being personalized too. Two people who each search on Google for “Egypt” may get significantly different results, based on their past clicks. Both Yahoo News and Google News make adjustments to their home pages for each individual visitor. And just last month, this technology began making inroads on the Web sites of newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times.

nytimes.com/2011/05/23/ opinion/23pariser.html

As Pariser points out, it is one thing when they show you products you might like based on previous searches, but it is chilling to consider the implications of political information being shaped in this manner. It takes the egocasting warned about by Christine Rosen’s article to serious new levels.

Pariser expands on these themes in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (Penguin Press, 2011). He shows how personalization of search results can become a prison of sorts. His use of the term “bubble” echoes my mention in Chapter Eight of the bubble experienced by tourists.

Acquainting students with the bubble

Pariser’s term "bubble" captures in a simple but powerful manner the challenge we all face when searching on the Net. It would serve well as a way of capturing this issue for students.

Teachers might lead students through search exercises like the one illustrated for Isadora Duncan at the beginning of this chapter. The goal is to alert them to the steering that goes on.

Another exercise is to have students test out Pariser’s claim that Google will present different findings for different folks. This works best when students are away from school where they are signing into Google accounts and using home computers that identify their location and track their previous visits. My own results for searches change when I am out of town, using wireless in a coffee shop or searching at home. Changing settings on Google for something like a default Google Maps location may dramatically shift search results so that local businesses appear.

The average person and the typical student will be blissfully unaware of this bubble, but it does not take much more than a half hour to acquaint them with the steering being done. It might take a bit longer for them to learn how to turn off the steering and become a “free range searcher.” Initially, the main goal is to awaken them to the phenomenon and make them aware of the costs and the benefits.

Back in 1998 I published “Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free Range Students” in Kappan (fno.org/text/grazing.html). At that time I did not predict that the freedom to wander originally associated with the Internet might later become limited by apparently benign personalization implemented to bolster sales of products and ideas.

The theme of this article is the value of raising young people to think, explore and make meaning for themselves.

This article will show how schools may take advantage of these electronic networks to raise a generation of free range students —young people capable of navigating through a complex, often disorganized information landscape while making up their own minds about the important issues of their lives and their times.

Back then I was concerned that students might have difficulty wading through the questionable information that would greet them on the new Internet.

The extensive information resources to be found in cyberspace are both a blessing and a curse. Unless students possess a toolkit of thinking and problem-solving skills to manage the inadequacies of the information landfills, yard sales, gift shoppes and repositories so prevalent on the “free Internet,” they may emerge from their shopping expeditions and research efforts bloated with techno- garbage, information junk food or info-fat.

Now the problem has shifted because many searchers depend on Google and other search engines to point them to the best information and protect them from the clutter of those early days. Unfortunately, they may be unaware of the information they will not be seeing.