The Google Effect, and What This Means for Teaching

John Bohannon

Nowadays we use the Internet as an extension of our brains. If we wish to find out the name of the actor we have just seen in a movie we google it on our computer or smartphone. We can look up the recipe of a dish or re-read a newspaper article we liked at any time online. But this way of accessing information “in the cloud” is changing the way we process and store information. We no longer try very hard to recall facts, and students are now better able to remember how to find information than the actual information itself.

What are the implications of this for teaching and learning? John Bohannon, a Boston-based journalist for Science magazine and visiting researcher at Harvard University will examine this question in his keynote speech at OEB 2011.