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Excercise: Practical Implications of Digital Literacy

Excercise: Practical Implications of Digital Literacy

The following aims introduce you to the practical implications of digital literacy training on our personal and professional lives.

There are, for example, some truly stunning revelations some people may have when being shown how to “properly” interact with digital tools like students discovering the undo/redo shortcuts halfway through their academic life or e.g. how a survey from 2011 revealed that 90% of people assessed do not know how to search for keywords on a website using cmd/ctrl+f.

Where are we now?

But let’s first reflect again on what you already know about this topic.

Please take a moment to reflect on if and how your understanding of the concept of digital literacy has possibly changed following this lecture.

1. How often do you use Google’s search engine in your daily life?

2. Do you usually find what you are looking for on Google?

3. Do you usually use or think about specific search strategies?

4. How long do you usually think about how to phrase a specific search?

5. Could you describe what the Google search engine does and how it uses keywords to, e.g., a preschooler?

6. What could a chapter on Google search possibly explain to you personally that you wouldn’t already know?

Note: Feel free to do this in your head or a separate document.

Getting started

So, to illustrate how awareness of use-cases, subtle strategies, and changes to digital habits can lead to disproportionate changes in our everyday lives, we’ll be working with a specific tool that most people use daily. Google. To be more precise, the Google search engine.

The following exercises aim to test your understanding of the Google search engine and teach relevant strategies to optimize your search.

Excercise 1: What’s a Google anyways?

We’ve probably all seen or heard about how some less “tech-savvy” people use Google like:

Alternative text
via reddit.com

I.e., using a more personal or conversational tone, relying on long, descriptive phrases instead of specific keywords, and being generally unaware of advanced search operators.

1. What would be some tips that you’d provide to this individual?

Note: feel free to do this in your head or a separate document.

Excercise 2:

Now, let’s further evaluate your Google search behavior. For this, we’ll have you briefly reflect on or write down how you would typically approach using Google to search for something. You could, e.g., mention search strategies, your use of search operators, if you’d go with sparse or particular prompts, etc.

Remember, this is a self-study course, so be open and honest. This will allow you to reflect on these materials and evaluate how far you’ve come or how much you already know!

Example Skill: How to google effectively

Now, let’s explore some simple tips to understand better how to search for something using Google effectively. This list is not extensive and all-encompassing, so check out the additional material at the end of the lesson if you want to up your search game!

1. Query formation (use central keywords and specifiers)

2. Use search operators

3. Change the search location and language (settings -> search settings -> region settings)

4. Don’t use biased questions

1. Query formation:

In general, keep in mind that:

Every word matters:

  • try searching for:

    • star

    • star wars

    • Star Wars novel

Order matters:

  • "War Stars novel" vs. "Star Wars novel"

Punctuation matters:

  • search for "red, delicious apple" vs "red delicious apple"

Use a basic search strategy:

  • take a stepping stone approach -> become increasingly more specific by successively including search terms, but make sure they are relevant inclusions

  • Incorporate search operators as demonstrated in the next part

2. Use search operators

  • exact matches? put key word in quotation marks "Key word"

  • exclude something from a search -> add a minus sign before the key word you’re excluding -> - Key word

  • Combine search terms with OR, AND logic

    • should a match necessarily include eboth terms use AND

      • e.g. square AND green

    • should a match necessarily only include one term but not the other use OR

      • e.g. square OR green

  • specify time-frames using AFTER:, BEFORE: or between ..

3. Change the search location and language

Language matters: searching for a specific german or english term?

- settings -> search settings -> region settings)

4. Don’t use biased questions

If you ever had to settle an argument you might have encountered this:

- Person A. googles -> has stress negative effects
- Person B. googles -> has stress positive effects

Now what’s the "ground truth"?

Instead use a neutral approach like:

  • pros and cons of stress

  • effects of stress

Additional Material

To learn more about how to effectively use Search engines, search operators, develop and evaluate search strategies or create literature maps - jump to our chapter on Scientific writing.

Digital literacy, Google Search and Science?

How learning to better your “googling” skills relates to digital literacy seems straightforward, but let’s put the skill behind “googling” into perspective.

A basic research workflow looks a lot like a basic google search strategy people may apply. Imagine looking for a new restaurant in your city to introduce a friend to your favourite kind of cuisine.

The steps could look something like this:

1.Task Identification

  • require information on “Where”, “What”, “When”, “How expensive”

2. Identify, locate and evaluate Sources

  • google, bing, duck duck go (and what’s the difference)?

  • what sites can you trust?

  • query formation?

3. Aquire information

  • look at some of the search results

4. Analysis

  • what’s the “best” restaurant regarding e.g. price, location and opening hours

5. communicate results

  • text your friend what you’ve found out

6. Evaluate Process and results

  • do search results suffice, are all questions answered? i.e is your friend not satisfied or you couldn’t come to an agreement? Start back at 1. and re-evaluate your task and query formation!


Conclusion

So with or without your explicit knowledge you’ve been doing research all along!

Now there are of course practices and “rules” to doing “proper” research, such as actually evaluating the qulaity and veracity of your sources. So, in future sessions we will be teaching you how to master each of the steps above and which open-source tools you may implement to better your research.

Additional materials

For more in-depth guides check-out the course:

Google education: Power Searching with Google

and the following video on how DR.Russel arrived at those straegies and how people “search”:

The Joy of Search: Augmenting Intelligence By Teaching People How to Search

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