When I was growing up, I used to hate it when my mother would answer my curious questions with her pat: “Go look it up”–meaning that I should look up the answer in one of the 3 dozen volumes of the hard-bound encyclopedias we had in the living room book case. I always swore that I was not going to say that when I had children. Instead, I catch myself saying: “I don’t know the answer to that, why don’t you Google it?” Really, it’s the same general answer and I wonder if my kids can even imagine a world without all that information right at their fingertips any moment of any day?
Up to the minute, abundance, multi-cultural information–about anything, anyone, and everything. All those years I spent learning how to use the card catalog and trying to find “current” bibliographies and information for research papers and now my own children are learning what are the “trusted” internet sites and how to filter out the fluff from the real information–BUT, they have it readily available and we can look up the etymology of any word, the history of any tribe or nation state, how a saying came to be, or what was the popular hairstyle in 1930. It is easy, quick, and extensive.
Normally, I am rather nostalgic in generally and I certainly am a woman who loves her books–but I don’t miss encyclopedias, I really don’t. I love being able to order shoes, look up a home remedy, purchase postage, and look for work all on the internet. I know that my children have access to far more information than I did and I can witness their knowledge and fascination with the world at large seems to be a reflection of the information super-highway known as the World Wide Web, and I am perfectly okay with not only encouraging them to “google” for answers, but doing it myself!
See Also the Education Blog and the Computing Blog