Tinkering
Before we plan anything for our students we need to take the digital tools for a spin.
- Try three new search engines (e.g. yahoo, hotbot, duckduckgo)
- Visit their advanced search page
- Compare the results for identical searches
- Spend a day using one of these search engines rather than Google
- Explore your university library search functions
The Assignment
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this assignment students will
- have mastered a new search engine
- understand the role of the new search engine in the context of the current search climate
What are the steps in this assignment? How will the students experiment, build, and then communicate their work? How does this assignment fit in with the rest of the course?
Experiment
The students will keep an ungraded experiment journal during the week that they spend using a new search engine. They will write up a blog post about their experience for the class blog. This assignment will help prepare them for the university library's workshop on how best to find peer-reviewed resources, and will help them to perform targeted searches as they conduct research for their term paper. None of these activities will take place in class.
Experiment Journal
Steps- Research the history of a new search engine (Take notes. When was it first launched? Who owns it? How is it funded? How does the advanced search work? Does it save information about its users? What are the novel features of its interface?)
- Try to spend a week using the a new search engine (Take notes. What are the advanced search and operator functions offered by the search engine? Did you get any surprising results? How did it make you feel? If you had to give up and return to Google, what was your breaking point?)
Build and Communicate
Blog post
Write a blog post containing a 100-word history of your search engine, a 100-word account of your experience, three tips for effective use of your search engine, a 200-word argument about the engines merits or faults relative to Google's search engine.Rubric
Blog post /15
Accurate history of the search engine /2
Clear account of the experiment process /2
Three tips /4
Logical argument for or against the search engine relative to Google's search engine /4
Correct formatting for blog post /1
Proofreading /1
Citations /1
Tutorials and Guidelines
- Google's search operators
- Google's advanced search page
- Duck Duck Go's search operators
- Bing's search operators
Cultural Context
- Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry)
- William Turkel on how to customize your browser as a research environment