I was having a conversation with my brother-in-law at the weekend, and he became quite heated on the subject of the internet and how frustrated he gets when looking for information - which is the reason why he says he had little time for the internet and searching through the rubbish to find the good stuff.
My feeling was that his reluctance to search the web meant that he was relatively inexperienced at it, which was part of the reason why he wasn't finding the stuff he wanted. It ended up with me promising to give him a short lesson in searching. I showed him the kinds of queries I put into Google, what I do when I don't immediately find what I want, how I evaluate what I find, comparing sources, that sort of thing. It seemed to work, and he admitted there were lots of techniques it hadn't occurred to him to try.
It made me realise that this really is something that needs teaching - in schools, for sure, but also to adults - teachers in particular. You can't just tell people to 'go away and look it up' as you might have done in a library in the past. People need to be taught the skills. It is not intuitive.
Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold recently posted a marvellous video interview which he called a 'mini course in crap detection' and it addressed this very point.
For some reason, people are indignant to find out that not everything on the web is to be believed, and use that as a reason to distrust everything. "There's so much rubbish out there!" Yes - but why throw the baby out with the bathwater? There's also a huge amount of good stuff. You just have to know how to find it.
Interesting post but I’m not surprised at all. Because I work with people from different industries and ages, I’ve found that some of them aren’t even sure how to access a shared Google doc, attach a file to an email (or download a doc from an email to their computer) or even open a new tab on their browser!
I’ve sometimes been quite shocked to have to explain to CV customers how to search online for advice and research companies they’re interested in – some of them are not really not sure how to use the internet at all.
I think we forget as we use the internet a lot, but there’s definitely a gap in internet knowledge with the more ‘average’ computer user including browsers, shortcuts, Google search, downloading, RSS feeds & readers, social media, and even basic email use such as using groups, label organisation, scheduling, blind CCing and attaching docs.