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Monday, December 19, 2011

Why you should never search if you're just making a school paper

We really feel like dinosaurs...

When we were at school, all we had were encyclopedias. Teachers would ask us, the students, to describe what happened in, for example, 1789 (The French Revolution). We would look up at the index, choose which volume of the encyclopedia we should open (not THAT kind of volume. encyclopedias came in, like, 20 books; each a "volume"), look "French Revolution, the" up, and trying to copy what it was written there, being careful not to copy word for word.I cannot begin to explain how different THAT was from what's going on today.

First of all, the sources of information are exponentially larger. You still got Wikipedia, of course (which, in itself is a heck of a lot better than the old encyclopedias), and a great help on homework, but you also have online articles, news, blog, discussions, senseless rambling (such as this text :) ), videos, images, references... you get the idea.

So, isn't a world of information better than just a couple of encyclopedia pages?
Unfortunately, in most cases, no.

With the drastic growth of information sources came the concept of "searching", that is: finding what you actually need amongst the sea of information. Let's not belittle this seemingly minor concept. It is a cornerstone in our online, and academic life. Nothing less. The ability to filter gold from garbage is what made Google what it is today, and it is the basis of most of the information companies around us.

But now even that is not enough. Sure, we all use Google search, but it seems that no matter what we do, we still have to filter the garbage ourselves...
This time consuming garbage filtering is really disruptive as it (a) takes a loooooooooooot of time and (b) just puts us off so much that if and when we actually find what we need, we don't have time to actually do a thorough job, reading, learning and integrating the material into something intelligent. Instead we "copy-paste" a lot, and modify a little so no one could blame us for copy-pasting.

This is not learning, provides little help on homework, if at all, and it is a waste of time. Wouldn't you rather spend your time actually doing something that would improve your skills, make you better, and you might learn something along the way?

Our opinion is, that if you're not an information professional, and you don't have to find adult business data or complex or very specific university-level information, YOU SHOULD SKIP SEARCHING ALTOGETHER. Don't waste your time on garbage filtering and focus on reading pre-fetched or indexed material instead.

So who would search for me and fetch the material I need for me, you ask?

Excellent question! Have you tried sCoolWork? :)


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