Hi
Having had an off-list post about Google Coop, I thought I'd just
clarify why I thought it was particularly interesting.
With my post, I wasn't really attracted by whether it was making
Google retrieve better. I suppose it was from the perspective of an
educator who has seen "classification and indexing" go out of
fashion (with practitioners more or less saying "why are you still
teaching this!" - well they were certainly saying that about
cataloguing at one point, and indexing/classification were also
starting to be seen as rather arcane amusements)
Then, as the internet and intranets started to be more and more
important, "taxonomies and metadata" coming back INTO fashion
and now here's Google trying to teach rather complex indexing
skills to the world at large. Since they ARE complex skills (how
many people are going to make it to the bottom of the Google page
that tells you what to do?), I don't think "all the world" really IS
going to become an information scientist, but I suppose it heartens
me to see hardcore info science skills being advertised in this way.
I don't teach cat and class any more*, but immediately it popped
up that this might be a tie-in that could help to rouse students'
interest.
Sheila
* Only got trapped into it in the first place because I'm one of the
ancient generation that had to do TWO HOURS EVERY WEEK of
cat or class throughout my postgrad course, therefore I couldn't
say I knew nothing about it. Those were the days, eh.
---------------------
Sheila Webber, Senior Lecturer, Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street
, Sheffi
eld S1 4DP, UK.
Email [log in to unmask]
Tel. (0044) 0114 222 2641
Information Literacy blog - http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/
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