Education 2.0 & 3.0

Welcome, BERT

Your internet searches are making Google one smart cookie, thanks to artificial intelligence.

 

For quite some time, algorithms have quietly worked their way through search engines, analyzing, and ranking the keywords. This newer search-ranking system is the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). Bert arrived in the search room in October 2019.

 

BERT is the artificial intelligence algorithm designed to understand subtleties in language. The program’s algorithms can discriminate between the use of prepositions like “to” and correctly determine relationships between words and phrases. It reads nuances.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Jamie McKenzie writes: "It is essential that schools teach students how to escape this stranglehold that Google creates. While helping visitors to find the information they need, Google effectively limits and narrows their searches - steering them toward the obvious and the conventional."

Via Mary Reilley Clark, Elizabeth E Charles

Here is a handy visual you can use with your students in class to help them become better Google searchers. We have outlined 8 search tips that students can use to narrow down their search and get accurate results. All of these tips are nested in Google Advanced Search which is accessible from 'settings' in Google search homepage. This visual is also available in PDF format from this page.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Twelve years ago I had student come up to me in the library and declare, “Mr. Byrne, Google has nothing on this!” Her topic was the Civil War. It was then that I realized my students needed a bit more guidance on how to conduct online research. In the years since that incident in the library I have spent a lot of time developing search lessons for students to help them become better at search. All of the lessons that I’ve created incorporate at least one of the following ten tips.

Via Elizabeth E Charles