In my late night antics I stumbled on this topic that seems to be a hot-button issue at law schools today. It was pretty interesting and touches on some intriguing questions related to the generation most of us are in.

The following is a short excerpt from the following research paper:
Forty-Two: The Hitchhiker's Guide To Teaching Legal Research To The Google Generation (don't let the size scare you, most of it is citations and footnotes)

quote:

ABSTRACT: Students are coming to law school increasingly dependent on computers to serve their research needs. And they expect that computerized legal research will be both more efficient and more effective than book-based research. These expectations place students in conflict with traditionalists who point to the inherent limitations of computer-assisted legal research and the dangers in relying on legal research conducted entirely in electronic databases. These traditionalists favor a “books first,” if not a “books only,” approach. This paper explores the cultural conflict between the traditionalists and the “Google generation,” evaluates the dangers associated with computer-assisted legal research, and proposes a pedagogical approach to research training that stresses a client-based approach over the more familiar medium-based approach presently employed by many law schools. ... The Google Generation Contemporary law students are likely to have little sympathy with the underlying premise of the traditionalist position – that paper-based research resources are inherently more effective than electronic databases and that they are more efficient to use.57 Assuming that first year law students have an average age of 24,58 we have reached the point where law students cannot remember a time when computers were not an integral part of their academic lives. Contemporary law students have grown up around computers, have used them primarily to attain the high level of academic achievement necessary to enter law school, and seem mistrustful both of physical libraries59 and of those who extol their virtues. Although it was impossible to tell at the time, the relatively small universe of legal information retrieval began a dramatic expansion in 1973, the year Mead Data Central first introduced the Lexis database.60 At first, neither Lexis nor Westlaw – introduced in 1975 by West Publishing as competition to Lexis61 – appeared to pose a challenge to print materials for legal research. Computers were not household items in the mid 1970s and the notion that a computer could ever have sufficient, convenient, storage capacity to replace a library would have been thought ridiculous. The advent of the computer chip, and the ability to store more and more information in a smaller and smaller space, has meant that computers now occupy the central societal role with which we are all familiar. And the impact of these technological advances on our students has been profound. Whereas only twelve years ago the library was the only place for undergraduate students to research the information necessary to write term papers or perform other independent research, the majority of students recently surveyed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project used the internet as a primary research source. 62 The study revealed that 73% of students used the internet more than the library to acquire information, while only 9% used the library more.63 Even when students used a university’s library facilities, the Pew study reviewing college students’ research habits found that the internet was still dominant. During direct observations of college students’ use of the Internet in a library and in campus computer labs, it was noted that the majority of students’ time was not spent using the library resources online. Rather, email use, instant messaging and Web-surfing dominated students[‘] computer activity in the library. [LOL!] Almost every student that was observed checked his or her email while in the computer labs, but very few were observed surfing university-based or library Web sites. Those students who were using the computer lab to do academic-related work made use of commercial search engines rather than university and library Web sites.64 It appears that many undergraduate students rely on research habits acquired before coming to college. Another Pew study showed that 94% of online teens have used the Internet for school research, and 71% used it as a major source for a recent school project.65 Unsurprisingly, students believe the internet to be a positive influence, with 34.3% strongly agreeing with the somewhat imprecise proposition that “[t]he internet has had a positive impact on my college academic experience in general,” 44.2% indicating agreement, 16% neutral, and only 3.5% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing.66 Unsurprisingly, students believe the internet to be a positive influence, with 34.3% strongly agreeing with the somewhat imprecise proposition that “[t]he internet has had a positive impact on my college academic experience in general,” 44.2% indicating agreement, 16% neutral, and only 3.5% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing.66 This increase in internet reliance comes at a time when books are quickly falling out of favor in American society.67 A recent study performed by the National Endowment For The Arts concluded that whereas in 1992, 60.9% of the population had read at least one book in the previous year, by 2002 that percentage had dropped to 56.6%.68 The decline was even worse when the researchers studied literary reading: from 54% in 1992 to 46.7% in 2002.69 And the decline is accelerating. In the years from 1982-1992, the decline for literary reading was 2.9%,70 but between 1992 and 2002 the decline was measured at 7.3%.71 Most significantly, when the study looked at people in our students’ age group – 18-24 year olds – it found that only 42.8% engaged in literary reading, a decline of 28% in 20 years.72 These results caused the study’s authors to conclude that “at the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century.”73 These study results are in harmony with the empirical data regarding law student library usage. Data from a Georgetown University Law Library study shows that student photocopying – an indicator of paper-based research – climbed steadily through the mid- 1990s, from 2,784,247 copies made in the academic year 1989-90 to 3,225,228 copies in 1993-94, and then declined precipitously thereafter, dropping to 2,699,334 in 1994-95 down to 1,564,181 in 1998-99. 74 The authors of the study correlated these findings with shelving statistics that are another indicator of book usage in a library, and the pattern was the same. The number of books shelved rose from 203,669 in 1989-90 to 263,050 in 1991-92.75 From there, the numbers dropped steadily to 96,601 in 1998-99.76 As these numbers demonstrate, our students may still be using law libraries, but the way in which they are using them has changed dramatically.77 They are comfortable with the internet, uncomfortable with books and libraries, and are headed for an unpleasant rendezvous with the traditionalists who still inhabit law firms, and who have very different ideas about the relative merits of books and electronic legal research.78

Heres an interesting blog of what I take to be a "traditionalist" describing his observations of how a "Googler" conducts research.

quote:

Designing for the Google generation I just spent a few days watching people use a search interface for a site (lets call it Site X for now). What stuck with me the most was how different the design challenge was if the user was of the "Google generation". Everyone showed the Google carry over effect - expectancy of high relevance, fast searches. But for undergraduates who had grown up with Google, it was as if that was the only experience they could deal with. Anything else was too complex, too slow, too not Google. Take Participant Y (Lets call her Susanne). Susanne is an undergraduate in a California University. She needs to find some information on Site X - she knows it houses some special types of information, not found anywhere else. She does not know much about this topic. Her first impulse is not to start on Site X, but to start with Google. She goes to the Google toolbar (other undergraduates went to Yahoo or Wikipedia) and types in an exploratory query. She scans the results, focusing on finding an authoritative site which will tell her more. One site looks promising. On clicking the link, she finds its an ecommerce site and bounces back to the search results, and types in a new query. This time the first result gives her what she needs - more information about the topic, and some ideas about words to search on. Armed with this knowledge and keywords, she (finally!) goes to Site X. She tries a long, specific query. And gets "0" results (unlike Google, site search engines do not have an infinite amount of information, and are not good at guessing what you are looking for. Very specific queries help only when you are using the language of the site.) She tries a few times with other, equally specific queries - each time getting 0 results. Finally, she decides to type in fewer terms, and gets some results. Results look promising, but its more items than she wants to scan (60 items is "too much"!). She adds another word in the search result, a word she saw in one of the result. Searching again and again takes time, and she complains about download speed pretty often. But in the end she is able to find the information she is looking for. Susanne never uses advanced search. Instead her queries get more and more specific. As her queries get more specific, the chances of getting 0 results also gets higher, and her frustration with the site increases. Later she talks about how she would be unlikely to use Site X again since she could probably find good enough results just through Google itself. Welcome to designing for the Google generation. Highly skilled at query development. Fast, impatient, and in a strange way - extremely inflexible. Nothing but a Googlesque interface will do. http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives...generation.html

Heres another blog from a traditionalist. This one rambled a little so I hacked it some.

quote:

Here comes everything: Can technology solve information overload? ... "Imagine turning on your computer in the morning to find an inbox full of articles, blog posts, audio and video programming gathered from a multitude of sources around the globe. No more sifting through the dross to find the gems, just a neat package tailored for you." It won’t happen tomorrow but its not science fiction either. Already, people around the world are using an array of mint-fresh technologies to open the door on growing worlds of expertise which help them navigate though the ever-expanding information universe that surrounds us all. The surprising consequence of these technologies is that its users are relying on people to be their guides more than ever before. Instead, of heading towards a fully-automated solution, today’s online leaders are replicating human communities and networks as the best way to sort the (informational) wheat from the chaff. More of that later but first we need to look at some of the shortcomings of search engines and the quest for a ‘pure technology’ solution. The search engine dream come true is something geeks call the semantic web. Through the use of intelligent agents (programs that ‘learn’ your preferences) they hope to turn cyberspace from a huge and confronting storehouse of documents into something that is more human in scale and appeal. In this vision of the future, intelligent agents would replace the functions of an array of people we have traditionally relied on like journalists, editors, teachers, researchers and, of course, friends and colleagues. We would no longer have to overcome the frustrating ad hocery of these ‘human’ networks. Instead, we would find the best of what’s available on any subject almost instantaneously. Cameron Reilly, a Melbourne blogger, podcaster and IT company-owner, would love to have a program that searches the Internet for him and provides daily updates of everything he should read, listen to or view to stay up-to-date in the areas critical to his business and recreational pursuits. We certainly need help from somewhere because cyberspace is already far too big for any of us to know or explore it through anything as antiquated as ‘surfing the net’. First up, all that information needs to be sorted in a way that allows us to move through it quickly and productively, finding the best and not wasting time with mountains of junk. There are basically three ways of organising information on the Internet – hierarchical (as they do in libraries), search and chronological. Currently, the most popular, and most practical, of these methods is, of course, search. Just about everyone with access to a computer uses search engines, Google users alone now conduct over 55 billion searches annually, because it provides a reasonably easy way of imposing some order on an otherwise chaotic world. Search engines are mind-boggling because of the sheer quantity of material they ‘index’ and the powerful algorithms that lay behind them. Although Google searches over 8 billion pages, its coveted, and secret, algorithms are able to find many accurate matches to your search queries and it finds them fast. So ubiquitous have search engines become that it is now possible to talk about a “Google generation” of people who expect to find the information they need, when they need it, by simply typing in the right search terms. Not everyone, however, is sanguine about this growing reliance on search engines. One prominent software developer, Nick Bradbury CEO of FeedDemon recently asked (about Google): “Are we really just building the next version of TV, one even more powerful because it knows your name and shopping habits? More to the point, are we simply creating a potent tool for controlling the next generation of mass-market sheep?” This is a somewhat surprising ‘geek’ perspective because it is more usual to criticise old media as encouraging passive, uncritical consumption of information whereas anything online is championed as active, independent and so on. Yet a closer look at search engines does point to some reasons for concern, and the most important among these is the question of quality. Search engines rely on a pretty crude approximation for quality. Essentially, they use the links between sites to estimate the popularity and authority of those sites when they rank the matches to your search terms. The commercial importance of this practice has not been lost on the legions of sharp operators that infest the Internet. As retail empire-builder Gerry Harvey has said: when someone wants to buy a television, for instance, the first step they take is to think of three shops, on average, to visit. If your shop is not on that list you are as good as dead. The same thing works on-line, the higher up the rankings your product or service goes the more hits you will get and the more eventual sales. So people go to a lot of effort to basically ‘game’ search engines. One of the more infamous techniques is called ‘google bombing’. With bombing, a number of websites link to a main site and by using the same piece of text they can force the main site up the google rankings. Bombing can be done very effectively by even a small group of sites. Besides gaming there is also the now well-established search engine optimisation industry (SEO) which offers people (“sure-fire”) techniques and tips for pushing their sites up those rankings. SEO devotees, for instance, will ensure that their site’s ‘key words’ feature prominently in any new content they create in an effort to own or dominate a particular idea or area of interest. As one prominent SEO company, ‘bigmouthmedia’, says: “There are over 3 billion web sites fighting tooth and claw for the best search position. There are billions of other pages not even listed in search engines. Let's hope they like the obscurity.” Quality is an ongoing issue for search engine users and it raises the deeper question of whether technological tools, on their own, can ever replace our traditional reliance on human networks for making appropriate judgments in this vexed area. In recent years, the popularity of blogging has created a way of finding quality information that resembles peer-reviewing. Bloggers create interest-based communities that assess, critique and recommend (or otherwise) relevant information and sources across the web. The most famous recent example of a blogging community in action was the ‘Rathergate’ incident, where bloggers swapped and aggregated information online, accumulating proof that the documents leaked to CBS were faked, and it all happened within a few hours. Political punditry and fact-checking are, nevertheless, only a tiny part of what happens in the blogosphere. If you don’t think blogging covers just about anything a human being could be interested in, then try this 60 second test. Enter ‘blog OR weblog ’ into google and just see how many results it generates. I did it for gardening and found a great site called “Horticultural” which is the work of Jane Perrone, deputy editor - news and politics at Guardian Unlimited. Jane blogs because she gets “help and advice from gardeners all over the place, and I feel part of something bigger. When I talk to most people about the joys of mulching, or try to explain why I put comfrey leaves into a bucket every few days, they look at me with mute uncomprehension”. Finding ‘help and advice’ through blogging networks is not only effective but it feels right because social relationships in the blogosphere approximate what happens offline. According to two American political scientists (in a July 2004 conference paper), Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell, the pattern of links across blogs is similar to what happens in our ‘real’ lives. Most people have a few friends and acquaintances; but a few people have large numbers of friends and acquaintances. These ‘popular’ people (and blogs) are the active nodes that weld broader networks together. These networks replace, or partially displace, searching because just about anything of real value in the relevant subject area which is loaded onto the web will get reviewed on the blog networks and usually sooner rather than later. Staying in regular contact with blog networks, however, would be awkward and time-consuming without Rich Site Syndication (RSS), undoubtedly the most important push (something sent without being initiated by the recipient's request) technology to emerge since email. While blogs and RSS are made for each other, many other regularly updated websites (particularly traditional media) also now offer RSS feeds. ... http://trevorcook.typepad.com/weblo...comes_ever.html

Its never been a secret that the most recent generations are known for their familiarity with technology. I was struck with this topic because its the first real feedback I've seen on the implications of this.

Surely trusting a single source, be it Google or the Internet in gerneral, for all information gathering needs can't be a good thing. But then rather to say either are a single source, but a gigantic collection of multiple sources. Even still, are the old ways of acquiring information really so obsolete? The paradox is while I'm inclined to say no, I find myself doing what is being described, in that anything not-Google is rarely an option.

Plenty of studies find that Google users have a "positive experience" and generally (almost always) find the information they need. But how often is that information thought to be the best information just because it was found at the top of the list? A reliance on the search engine to turn out the best quality information is surely a mistake when one considers how search engines operate to rank it and the ease at which it is to rig said rankings.

So then where does that put us?

BTW - All this information was found using Google.