{"id":233,"date":"2008-12-10T00:01:55","date_gmt":"2008-12-10T08:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=233"},"modified":"2008-12-07T20:53:03","modified_gmt":"2008-12-08T04:53:03","slug":"fat-drunk-and-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=233","title":{"rendered":"“Fat, Drunk, and Stupid…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…is no way to go through life, son.” That memorable line was spoken by the baleful Dean Wormer in Animal House<\/em> (1978). In the early 21st Century, however, the statement can be replaced with the following:<\/p>\n

Googling your way through life will get you nowhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Granted, it’s not as powerful, but it’s a highly relevant point.
\n
\nIn 1997, I wrote that the Internet was like a library without the vital element of a card catalog or librarian. Through a wildly successful search engine, Google has become the Internet’s librarian. Of course, that comparison isn’t exactly spot-on because the Internet is not<\/em> a library, not in the sense that it contains unique and worthy contributions to the culture, knowledge, and wisdom of mankind.<\/p>\n

Nope, using the Internet for research is similar to asking someone a question at a cocktail party: Sometimes you get the right answer, but most often the answer you get is merely a repetition of information already gathered by someone else, which may or may not be valid. That’s okay for some purposes, but when it comes to education or your job, it’s information you’d never dare use. Ditto for Google.<\/p>\n

Despite warnings, many students use Google (specifically Wikipedia) as a study tool. That’s okay, but not valid by itself. Going to school is not about being a parrot. Having a job is not about doing something that anyone else can to. Nope, it’s about using your own noggin. After all, if your teacher or boss can use the Internet to look up the same answer that you did, then what use are you?<\/p>\n

During my recent robotic judging<\/a> tour, I was paired with Sal, who teaches high school technology. He’s tough on kids who use Google to write their homework. Basically, he picks out one, very well-written sentence from a student’s report and uses it as a Google search term. Most of the time, the search results display the exact paper the student claimed that they wrote. End result: An F.<\/p>\n

It happens a lot.<\/p>\n

I assume it also happens in various businesses around the country as well. I know that when I’m researching stuff on the Internet, I find the same answer repeated thousands of times. While researching some error codes recently, of the 300,000 “hits” that Google reported, I discovered that nearly all of them were the same document repeated, copied, and quoted. All of them. Over and over. That wasn’t 300,000 hits, but only one hit. (I eventually confirmed the answer in printed documentation elsewhere.)<\/p>\n

So while the Internet is a useful tool, it’s not the modern equivalent of the Library at Alexandria, and Google is no Erastosthenes. If you really want to better yourself, don’t copy-and-paste your way through life: use a book. The value of a book over the value of a web page is more than just the cover price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…is no way to go through life, son.” That memorable line was spoken by the baleful Dean Wormer in Animal House (1978). In the early 21st Century, however, the statement can be replaced with the following: Googling your way through life will get you nowhere. Granted, it’s not as powerful, but it’s a highly relevant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}