It really happened #1: A history teacher asks an 8th grade kid to write an article about the Rajputs. The kid does not ask her parents to help. It does not occur to her to peep into the bookshelf where some volumes of Amar Chitra Katha (much akin to Marvel & DC) do contain stories of Prithviraj and others. Instead, she plays on her Wii until the date of submission and 10 minutes before her school bus arrives, she quickly logs into her mother's home computer and does a google-search on Rajputs. She picks the top 10 links, opens all of them in tabs at once and quickly runs through the tabs to see which ones have nice pictures. She then opens a Word document; copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste... and soon she has 5 pages of text and a picture for each page. She spends a minute on creating a cover page with large colorful letters, another minute on adjusting the formatting on the rest of the pages and begins to print.
Total time spent: 4 minutes 18 seconds.
Total learning by the child about Rajputs, while “writing” this article: NIL.
Realization by the teacher that the assignment failed to achieve the learning objectives: Doubtful.
Continuation of #1 above: Dad walks in when he hears the printer noise. He reads the first page and notices that some of the content has been repeated (having been copied from multiple sources). He asks the daughter a few questions and realizes the problem. He explains to her that she needs to learn to write in her own words (for which she needs to be familiar with the content) and attempts to teach her how to organize thoughts and present them in a reasonable structure and sequence. The kid nods impatiently for a while and says “Daaaad! I gotta submit this today and I am getting late for my bus, okay? I will do it your way next year. Promise!” and runs out.
It really happened #2: Kuldeep has been in my corporate marketing team for a year now. He is friendly and helpful. I've noticed that others run to him for help quite often and return happy. He is considered quite intillegent and capable of helping out in most situations. Yet, I have had problems in getting him to translate ideas into output; in getting him to understand the kind of brand image we want to build for the company. Since others clearly think highly of him, I often wondered whether there is a flaw in how I am trying to get work out of him. So I spent a two days walking around and observing how (and in what areas) he helps others. I saw that he was a power Google user!! He could construct complex Google queries and obtain the most pertinent search results with lightning speed. He proudly showed me a few tricks that I had no idea about, until then. I returned to my desk, very impressed about Kuldeep and a bit more knowledgeable on search techniques.
In the process, I also realized one thing. Kuldeep is a wizard at finding what has already been written and available on the web. He only has problems when I ask him to imagine/visualize something, think out-of-the-box or understand a concept. He can't create anything of certain complexity from scratch.
It really happened #3: I was expanding my development team and so, hired several new programmers. I had every confidence in the Project Manager (who I worked with for several years and always got good results) who interviewed and selected the new employees. After a few weeks of training and orientation it was time to assign them to real projects. I called Aarthi, one of the new hires, explained to her the logic for a small function (yeah, I know, I should've first written out a detailed design doc) and asked her to implement it, write another program to unit-test it and show me.
By evening, Aarthi was beaming. She came to me and said she completed the work. I walked up to her desk and she runs the test program. Out come the results........... exactly the opposite of what I asked for. I asked her to show me the code and quickly realize the problem area. One “if” statement was wrongly “phrased”. A very minuscule error that I figured will take a minute or two to fix. I showed her the line, explained the change needed and went home. The next day, by noon, I saw two more of the new hires huddled around her desk, staring at the screen and discussing animatedly. Soon, Aarthi was in tears. She came to me and confessed that she was unable to finish the job. I went to her desk. Instead of simply making the change myself, I asked a few questions and asked her to make the changes while I watched. She messed around a bit and made several fundamental errors before getting the program to compile (and still not cracked the problem). It was then that I noticed the minimized browser titled “if else – Google”. I clicked on it and found 23 tabs open. Each of them had a program segment. The third tab had a program segment with the exact variable names and comparison phrase in Aarthi's program. In less than a minute, Aarthi confessed that she did copy that code segment, but neither she nor her friends were unable to find anything on “Google” (not the “net”, mind you) that matched what I wanted.
Alas, I had to fire Aarthi + her two friends. Plus give an earful to my hitherto trusty Project Manager.
I think I've given enough examples by now. Google has irrevocably changed how we learn and how we work. We are now getting used to turning a reference aid into a crutch. We don't see anything wrong with turning a knowledge base (inappropriately) into a substitute for thinking and logic. How more and more children (and adults) are falling prey to this.
I find that a vast majority of parents and teachers are unaware of this fundamental shift. I see no evidence that educationists have adapted to this new reality. Unless we change the way we teach and train, we will soon see a crisis coming up in the available-talent vs demand mismatch.
The signs of this crisis are already quite visible. Surprisingly, Google search doesn't readily show those signs. When it does, we will surely wake up.
Epilogue that should've been a Prologue:
Much has been written about the impact of Google's phenomenal success on the world. This is one more drop into the ocean. I have had very minimal exposure to what has been written so far, so there is a small hope, that I might have brought in some fresh perspective without the influence of what has already been written. Of course, I welcome any pointers to sources where the same or similar topics may have already been explored.
As an IT professional, the very first reason for interest in the Google story was the way they built their initial server farms. My studies into search engines, search engine algorithms, search engine optimizations (of websites; so that they would be found more readily and higher up in the search results) etc., were not limited to Google. But the study of how server farms might be built with “older equipment” caught the imagination. Soon, the realization of the impact on power consumption, heat generation and other factors took the glamour away, but the message (of innovation) stuck with me.
Fortunately, this is not about server farms. Rather, it is a bit of a sociological piece, not Information Technology.
Non-disclaimer: Names of people changed..... to deliberately cause offense to those other than the real people! ;)
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