The University of Google

There has been plenty of coverage stemming from Tara Brabazon's "The University of Google", and Brabazon's recent inaugural lecture at Brighton University, where she is Professor of Media. Here is a selection:

• White bread for young minds, says professor - The Times, 14 January 2008;
• Reference books: give me Wikipedia - The Times, 16 January 2008;
• Lecturer bans students from using Google and Wikipedia - Brighton (?) Argus;
• Plagiarism - blame academia, not students - Donald Clark 19 January 2008.

Brabazon seems to be being lumped in with Andrew "cult of the amateur"  Keen as a "snobby traditionalist". I'm not so sure. Though I found her book a bit of a curate's egg, there is nothing wrong with her underlying argument that as the world's information becomes available

i) through the single entry-point of web-search, and

ii) decreasingly pre-filtered by experts

people, including students, need different and better ways of judging the quality and relevance of what they find.

I liked the extensive use of footnotes to sources, the book's generally sharp attitude to top-down managerialism in Higher Education, and its concrete and credible examples of assignments designed to develop students' information literacy. And Brabazon is clear about the power and value of, for example, Google Scholar, and Google Book Search.

But I did have reservations. The carefully crafted chapter-titles (e.g. "Digital Eloi and analogue Morlocks") began to niggle, and the book could have been 40% shorter. Though I imagine that Brabazon is an inspirational and committed teacher who makes a big and beneficial difference to her students (it is interesting to read the student comment on the Brighton Argus article above), she seems almost to need to show us how much her students think of her, even if this happens, in passing, whilst discussing, justifiably, real exchanges between her and her students. (I do not share her apparent stance that teachers have to be central to learning.) Brabazon is completely silent on the work of people like Lawrence Lessig and David Weinberger, and she steers clear of any significant discussion of "Open Source and  Open Content", with Wikipedia warranting only a couple of pages.  [I do not know when the copy for the book was finalised, but if this was after early 2007, then I think Wikia's efforts to involve users in improving the quality of search results (see also SearchWikia), should have got a mention.]

Finally, Brabazon's argument hinged in part on the incorrect premise that Google's page rank system (see also this 1998 paper by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page [124 kB PDF]) takes account of how many actual hits the page being ranked gets, rather than how many inward links it has, and from where  (note also the swerve in the final couple of sentences to sound-bite from inaccurate premise):

"Google ranks their (sic) search results via the popularity and number of links and hits to that site. For example, when 'Tara Brabazon' is entered into Google, the number one returned search is my Home Page, the site developed (by me) to promote my career. The links with less hits, but perhaps more critical information, are far lower on the  ranking. My personal web page has so many hits because a link is presented to it at the bottom of each email I send from my work computer. Not surprisingly, hundreds of curious undergraduates with a bouncy index finger click to their teacher's profile....... Ponder the more serious consequences when students click onto highly ideological sites that are assessed by popularity, not qualitative importance or significance...... The assumption of Google is that popularity of sites is validation of quality. Google is the internet equivalent of reality television: derivative, fast, and shallow."

As soon as I find that kind of error in a book, especially early on, I begin to lose confidence in the whole thing, worrying that there are others lurking there, which I do not have the domain knowledge to spot.

[With minor edits, 22/1/2008]

Comments

[Frances Bell]

Thanks for the heads up on this book Seb. I will look it out. I found it interesting that Tara Brabazon's 'banning' of Google and Wikipedia in first year work is interpreted as Luddite by Donald Clark rather than as a strategy for developing students' media literacy. I am in tune with her argument as expressed by you above (a trusted peer review but I will check it out for myself). It is worrying to find the error you did. Let's see how Brabazon responds to that. She could actually use her own mistake as part of her argument if she is brave enough to explore it.

[Michael]

I was at Tara's recent inaugural lecture at the University of Brighton and taped the lecture. You can find the link at http://nomadx.org/content/view/1810/63/

Regards
Michael