Searching, info literacy and commercialism

While watching tv tonight, I saw a commercial for gifts.com, which allows you to enter a profile of the person you are shopping for, and then the site selects and recommends gifts you can purchase and the online stores that sell the gifts.  A great idea–a customizable, personal shopper online.

All of which made me recall the book I’m currently reading–The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture, by John Batelle(editor of Wired Magazine).   Batelle posits that search and advertising will start melding in ways that are almost indistinguishable, and that search engines  can already allow advertisers to directly market to  specific consumers(witness Amazon.com as a brilliant example of this.)

Further, a new article out in Time Magazine, How to Build a Student for the 21st Century, raises some important questions for me about information literacy skills our students will need in the future.  (By the way, this cover story is must reading about preparing students for future learning.)

Points out Dell executive, Karen Bruett, (board member of  Partnership for 21st Century Skills), 

“It’s important that students know how to manage it[information], interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it.”

All of which brings me to the question–am I and are all of us doing a good enough job helping students with information literacy and research skills, so that they will be able to distinguish the fact from the influence peddling?   And how can we in schools help students build the analytical skills so that when they look at a screen of results on a search engine, they know what is free, what is paid for, what is relevant, and where advertising is embedded?

We keep saying this–but as information overload increases for all of us, we have to help students with the tools to wade through all of the information and try to discern the quality from the fluff from the advertising.  

Batelle’s book and Time’s article lead me to believe this is going to become even more challenging as the lines begin to blur.

Comments on the article in Time?  Ideas for what we can do to help students?

timemag.jpg       search.jpg

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