OK, quick: How many times do the words “America,” “free” and “states” appear in the Declaration of Independence? Now add those together, and what do you get?
Ah, ah — keep your finger off that smartphone. Don’t touch that tablet. And definitely get your eye off your Google Glass.
“Use your brain, not your technology,” cautions “quiz princess” Hailley Field, after repeating the tiebreaking question at a recent Tuesday night Brainstormer Pub Quiz in Oakland, Calif.
Teams huddle. Tension builds, overpowering the heady scent of nachos and sliders, and a group of admittedly nerdy friends with the cumbersome, yet apt, team name of “There’s No iPhone in Integrity” comes through for the win. (Answer: 14.)
It doesn’t take a trivia buff to answer this one: Are there any “unGoogle-able” questions left in the world? Fueled by pocket-size power, we harness the current sum of human knowledge at our fingertips, plus a whole bunch of junk like what LeBron James had for lunch while vacationing in France. Turning to technology for data, for knowledge — maybe even for truth — has become an impulse, a physical reflex. And it’s changing everything, from the way we consume and retain information to the sources we trust, sometimes fervently or blindly, to provide it.
Sweating the organic chem midterm the midnight before the test? Go to the educational website and get an instant tutorial. Need to crack open one of those confounding Thai coconuts? Watch a YouTube vid some guy made in his kitchen. Worried about how to bathe your newborn? Don’t rely on your own mother’s trials and errors. Go to sites like and seek the collective wisdom of thousands of moms.
Technology has redefined knowledge in terms of who can access it, who can possess it. Now, everyone’s a Cliff Clavin. Everyone’s an expert, or can be in a matter of seconds.
And there’s nothing trivial about that.
TRUE OR FALSE: A vast majority of teachers think the Internet makes students more self-sufficient researchers.
Answer: Not exactly. Sixty-five percent of teachers who instruct advanced high-schoolers and middle-schoolers agree. But 83 percent feel the amount of information available online is overwhelming to most students, and 60 percent believe today’s technologies make it harder for students to find credible sources of information. (Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project)
Annie Hatch, a history and English teacher at Oakland’s Life Academy High School, is one of those educators who says this now-we-have-it knowledge is a blessing and a burden. Blessing: There’s so much information out there. Burden: There’s so much information out there.
“I can’t even fathom how different teaching before the Internet must have been,” said Hatch, 29. “I’m sure it was easier in many ways, but also much more limited, and probably often frustrating.”
When Hatch was designing a new unit on the book “In the Time of the Butterflies,” she went online and found information about the Dominican Republic and historical events of the book’s time period. She also found videos and interviews with the author and poems and other texts, countless images, comprehension questions, ideas for projects — “I mean, literally, everything,” she said.
“And there’s the burden: There’s so much out there, it can be overwhelming, time-consuming and confusing. Where to start? Where to look? What to use?”
Because of the glut, Hatch often sees students use inaccurate sources in their papers, or “run wild with a theory they read on some websites that they assume must be telling the whole truth,” Hatch said.
Such easy access to anything and everything by anyone almost anywhere is surely liberating, democratizing, educating, time-saving.
But with such a glut of information, how do we know what we know is true? Accurate? Real?
TRUE OR FALSE: The Affordable Care Act contains a “hidden” tax on hunting and fishing equipment.
Answer: False. There is a 2.3 percent excise tax on certain medical devices. Cabela’s, a Nebraska sporting goods company, applied the tax to some of its customers’ purchases by mistake. (Source: )
Can we be fooled more easily now than in pre-Internet days? Or are hoaxes and misstatements more quickly exposed because everyone’s watching? Surely Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast would be instantly Googled away, rather than creating the widespread panic it did in 1938.
“The people peddling misinformation can be exposed more easily, if you know where to look,” said Eugene Kiely, director of the nonprofit , a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, launched in 2003 to rebut inaccurate or false claims by politicians. “But if people aren’t looking to get at the truth, they can be easily misled.”
