JISC initiated a study involving a combination of examination of data from longitudinal studies and new research to see whether the “Google Generation” (post-1993) approached research tasks in a significantly different way to people from previous cohorts.
They define six types of behaviour:
- Horizontal information seeking. A form of skimming. “Around 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 per cent) never return.”
- Navigation. People in virtual libraries “spend as much time finding their bearings as actually viewing what they find.”
- Viewers. Users spend typically four to eight minutes looking at e-books and e-journals. “New forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles.”
- Squirreling behaviour. Research shows academic users “will squirrel away content in the form of downloads [but] there is no evidence as to the extent to which these downloads are actually read.”
- Diverse information seekers. One size does not fit all, in terms of attributes such as gender or status.
- Checking information seekers. “Users assess authority and trust for themselves in a matter of seconds by dipping and cross-checking”.
The report suggests “There is little direct evidence that young people’s information literacy is any better or worse than before.” However, it finds important themes:
- The apparent facility of young people with computers “disguises some worrying problems.”
- “The speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information…”
- “Young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies.”
- They tend to use “natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective”.
- Faced with a long list of results, they find it difficult to assess relevance and “print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them”.
Although they begin to focus on the use of “virtual libraries”, many of the insights have wider implications, such as:
“Children (especially) tend to make very narrow relevance judgements by considering the presence or absence of words exactly describing the search topic: as a result they miss many relevant documents and end up repeating searches. Information seeking tends to stop at the point at which articles are found and printed, especially for younger users, with little regard to the document content.”
They also examine some of the suppositions about the Google Generation (p18-20), finding many are myths. For example, “They prefer quick information in the form of easily digested chunks, rather than full text” is just as true of older people. The researchers brand the idea that “they are expert searchers” a “dangerous myth”.
The report goes as far as to question the whole notion of a Google Generation:
“A 2007 survey by Synovate finds that only 27% of UK teenagers could really be described as having the kind of deep interest and facility in IT that the label implies. The majority (’average Joes’, 57%) use relatively low level technology to support their basic communication or entertainment needs and there is a substantial residuum of 20% (’digital dissidents’) who actively dislike technology and avoid using it wherever possible.”
To summarise, “Our overall conclusion is that much writing on the topic of this report overestimates the impact of ICTs on the young and underestimates its effect on older generations. A much greater sense of balance is needed.”
See www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf
From Naace Newsletter 8/2/8
