I remember a student who was assigned to write a SWOT analysis on Coke Classic. He came to my office quite concerned because he couldn't find any information to write the paper. Knowing there was plenty out there, I asked him to show me how he was searching. He simply entered Coke Classic in the search bar and was annoyed that he was only getting back the Coke websites. We started searching for strategy topics related to Coke Classic and he walked away with a big smile on his face!
Fast forward a few years and I imagine most of our students do better than that. Are they getting the most they could out of searches, though? In my experience, most people don't.
So I wrote a post on how to search effectively on my Protecting Yourself in Cyberspace blog. It's target audience is unskilled computer users like the lovely retired folks I often make presentations to in my current life.
This post works for both audiences, however. It includes an update I wrote when I realized that Google Alerts was a good additional piece of knowledge. The update contains a good link to uses of Google Alerts which suggests an alert on your own name, which every one of us should do. Your students should start one now as part of their personal brand creation on the web. I use mine to find out who's trying to sell our books illegally. What people will do to attract clicks is amazing and I occasionally find something that the Cengage legal team finds actionable.
I'd be delighted if you referred your students to the post 👏 And I'd be even more delighted in you worked up a challenging search exercise and shared it with all of us 👏👏
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