On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:30:00 -0400, Dobbs, Aaron <AWDobbs_at_SHIP.EDU> wrote:
>Who(m?) of us would have answered differently at age 18?
>When one has nothing to compare against except one's own saticficing, of
course one will report that one is good at something.
>
>It's not enough (I posit it is misleading) to ask people at age 18 their
opinions of themselves and their skills and abilities. The trick is to
pre-test, attempt to educate, and post-test to determine what learning
happened - and adjust the attempts to educate accordingly.
>
>On the other hand, the "the user is not broken" school of thought
suggests/indicates certain systems lack efficacy, and therefore increase
irrelevance of certain resources. What needs to change in order to provide
the effects expected by the age 18 (or an arguably research-process-naïve) user?
I think this may attest to something else. With our traditional tools, it's
normally easy to know when a search is wrong (you get a zero result, or
almost) while in Google/Yahoo, you almost never get one. You get tens of
thousands of results and then settle for the one "you like best."
Google/Yahoo are based on the business model of "customer satisfaction" no
matter if it's all completely biased, hoaxes, outdated or whatever. Google
is not concerned with giving people reliable, selected information, which is
the library model. So long as their users go away smiling, that's all that
matters. Therefore, it only makes sense that people are happy and conclude
they are doing a pretty good job when they search. In my experience, this
includes people up to age--oh, about 100. It's everybody, not just young
students.
When students come to university, they are using this familiar tool (Google)
in entirely new ways and discover it doesn't work as well. They are shown
other tools that are strange and baffling.
I think these moments must be humbling and humiliating for them, and I've
had to work very gently with students who finally come to see me, while some
come in only after they have driven themselves half-mad with frustration.
After all, they really thought they were the experts! It's a highly delicate
matter at these moments.
But that's the world we have to deal with.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Oct 27 2009 - 11:01:01 EDT