Google Search….try it | Informational Literacy Task for common core by Jeff Piontek

My favorite Google search (this week) is: “digital citizenship” site:k12.*.us filetype:pdf. What’s yours?

I break down this search a little later. But first, some perspective.

The new survival is not drowning in information

And we all want to survive. In fact, many of the online resources that have been developed in the last decade have been life rafts that help us keep our heads just above the water line of the digital deluge. Ironically, in the process, each one of them adds to the problem by making more credible information more desirable and accessible. The saying “no free lunch” comes to mind, as do McLuhan’s Laws of Media (enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, reversal) which basically say there’s “no free lunch” when it comes to innovation.

In this case, we are interested in the law of reversal—specifically, the ability of the new ways we now have to package, distribute, and share information to actually make it harder to process the information that is made available to us. We are now overwhelmed with shared, highly recommended, relevant information. And when there is too much good information, we have to wonder if we are better off than when there was too little.

Twitter approached managing info overload by reducing news to headlines. Now I get a gazillion tweets, some of which entice me to look at the broader story beneath the headlines, which requires time I don’t have because I have too many tweets to read. I wouldn’t want to miss something.

Facebook (and social media in general) approached info overwhelment by allowing us to band together and to share what we know, so we could pick and choose among the information in our lives based on recommendations from friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, we all have a gazillion Facebook friends, all of whom have a lot of ideas about how you should spend your time, energy, and money. These Facebook friends also need to realize it is a social network site NOT their diary!!!

Better living through better searching

But then there is better searching. It is a bit of a bright star in the world of overwhelment because being a good Google searcher can do things like reduce the number of hits in a search from millions to hundreds. I have been a passable Google searcher for some time, and it amazes me how many people aren’t. If I ask a group to search, for example, for recent reports being used in K12 on the topic of digital citizenship, many will use a search like, “recent reports about digital citizenship in K12 in the United States.” That just returned 219,000 hits.

I used: site:k12.*.us “digital citizenship” filetype:pdf. In addition, I limited my search to one year. That produced 257 hits. Let’s look at the components of that search command.

• site: says “only return results from servers with the domains of this form”—in this case, school districts
• k12.*.us takes advantage of the fact that many school district domains are in the form of k12.twoLetterStateAbbreviation.us. So districts in Oregon tend to have domains that end in “k12.or.us.” The use of the wildcard (*) says “accept anything in this spot,” which would be any two-letter state abbreviation. Please note that some districts don’t use this domain format, but many do.
• “digital citizenship” is in quotes because I only want the search to return results with the phrase, rather than finding these words individually, anywhere on the site
• filetype:pdf says “only return PDF files”. I do this because I find organizations commit information to PDF when they are serious about distribution. If I remove this, my results jump to 2,120, which is still rather manageable in the world of Google searches.

If I specifically don’t want information about elementary programs, I might add “-elementary”, so my search becomes: site:k12.*.us “digital citizenship” filetype:pdf -elementary, which yielded 129 hits. I might also look to see what the government has published about this in the past year, and use site:gov. That yielded 90 hits. Or perhaps universities, by using site:edu. That yielded 216 hits.

While Google’s Advanced Search features are helpful, you have to be able to think like Google. And the way it thinks isn’t all that sophisticated. And of course there is always Google Scholar.