Was just realizing:
When I was a young pup, our public school system spent a fair bit of time teaching students how to effectively search a library.
Do current iterations teach students how to effectively craft a search query for various search engines and which engines are best for which queries?
@djsundog The international school I was in a decade ago tried to.
@djsundog I was an IT teacher at a few diff public high school in Australia for a while, it depends on the school here. We did in one but not another.
@djsundog varies widely from what I understand, but mostly no. Librarians, when schools have them and in public libraries, do try. Teaching people how to search and how to evaluate the results is considered a critical part of librarianship but cuts cuts cuts to education.
@ruth even imagining a school without a librarian is causing parts of my brain to core dump.
Librarians collectively taught me a lot more than teachers did.
@djsundog no, they don't.
@djsundog not sure about high school, as I haven't been for over 15 years, but college does in intro English classes
@djsundog One big issue with digital libraries is that most of the best databases for papers, academic publications, etc. are behind paywalls which high schools don't have access to. Even my county library's database access is nothing compared to my university. Even when my high school attempted to teach students about searching databases, the results were so terrible that the value of them was lost. The disparity in access to information is more than a little scary.
@djsundog a little bit. there was a solid program a while ago here, but it never caught on
@djsundog I am 33 and was was taught how to use search engines and about what ones were available in high school.
I gave a presentation on the features of hotbot.
@djsundog Yep, some school systems do that. Often part of the competencies being taught. Which doesn't mean that learners remember those things, but it sure is done.
@djsundog When I was back in high school, they were just getting started with that. They were teaching search operators and how to validate sources.
Being a super-nerd, this didn't really teach me much, but it did help my more non-technical friends.