Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Unlike search results on Google.com, Google Scholar search results isn’t a ranking of websites. Instead, Google Scholar search results are lists of scholarly articles related to your query. Google Scholar can also be used to locate United States patent filings as well as state and federal court cases.

Welcome, BERT

Your internet searches are making Google one smart cookie, thanks to artificial intelligence.

For quite some time, algorithms have quietly worked their way through search engines, analyzing, and ranking the keywords. This newer search-ranking system is the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). Bert arrived in the search room in October 2019.

BERT is the artificial intelligence algorithm designed to understand subtleties in language. The program’s algorithms can discriminate between the use of prepositions like “to” and correctly determine relationships between words and phrases. It reads nuances.

Twelve years ago I had student come up to me in the library and declare, “Mr. Byrne, Google has nothing on this!” Her topic was the Civil War. It was then that I realized my students needed a bit more guidance on how to conduct online research. In the years since that incident in the library I have spent a lot of time developing search lessons for students to help them become better at search. All of the lessons that I’ve created incorporate at least one of the following ten tips.

Google is definitely one of the major entry ports for searching the net. Knowing how to conduct effective and smart search queries on Google has become an important skill for 21st century students. There is an over-abundance of information online and unfortunately a decent amount of the online knowledge is amateurish, unfiltered and at worse misinforming. This is why Googling the world wide web goes beyond randomly typing a bunch of words and waiting for the ‘feeling lucky’ button to do its work; it’s rather an informed process that takes into consideration a wide range of variables that include the choice of the words we use in our queries, the positioning of these words in a search phrase, the use of operators and symbols and many more.

This is an excerpt from a book that I have been working on for the last fifteen months. I'm getting close to finishing it. 

Our students have become accustomed to entering a search into Google as soon as they are confronted by a question to which they don’t have an answer on the tips of their tongues. However, if they’re forced to take a few minutes before they search, they often find that they already know the answer. This is why a pre-search checklist should include listing what you already know about a topic. This list can be generated from memory or from notebooks (physical and digital). Not only does this process refresh students' memories, it also saves time in the long-run because they aren't spending time searching for information that they already have.

Here is a handy visual you can use with your students in class to help them become better Google searchers. We have outlined 8 search tips that students can use to narrow down their search and get accurate results. All of these tips are nested in Google Advanced Search which is accessible from 'settings' in Google search homepage. This visual is also available in PDF format from this page.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here is a handy visual featuring 8 important Google Drive search tips for teachers. More specifically, you will get to learn how to: search for a document that contains a specific phrase, search for files that contain at least one of the words, find documents that do not contain a particular word, find documents owned or shared by or with a particular person, search your Drive by document type, search for documents edited before or after a specific period of time, find documents by title, and finally find items that can be opened by only certain apps.

There's a recording of a webinar held in June 2019 on Searching with pubmed. It has presentations: How to search PubMed: The easy way (Margaret Vugrin); Searching PubMed Like an Expert: The Evolution (Nancy Adams, Marie C. Cirelli); Teaching PubMed Basics: An Active, Flipped Pedagogical Approach (Virginia Desouky); The Amazing Research Race: PubMed Edition (Annie Zeidman-Karpinski). Go to https://acrl.libguides.com/c.php?g=519489&p=6027142 for the recording and the powerpoints.

Teaching students how to conduct smart search queries online is an important part of cultivating a digital citizenship culture within your classroom.  Smart searching goes beyond the simple ability to conduct quick search queries to how to effectively locate information online and assess their authenticity and accuracy. In other  words, smart searching encompasses a complex set of interrelated skills and competencies that together make up the holistic picture of what it is to be a search savvy netizen.

Improve your online research skills and your ability to critically analyse sources of information.