In my childhood, before I could read, I remember that to any
question I had there was an answer provided solely by adults (parents,
neighbours, relatives). As I grew up and learned to read my father who was the
main source of information and got tired with answering too many questions came
home one day carrying three volumes of the very popular encyclopedia in the
USSR “I Want to Know”. I was very excited. In alphabetical order there were
answers to a lot of questions that troubled my child’s mind. I confess I still
had to ask my father sometimes as the encyclopedia didn’t have the answers to
all my questions. I went to university and in my quest for knowledge my “I Want
to Know” encyclopedia and my father’s knowledge weren’t exhaustive enough. And
I started to attend the libraries where in huge wall cabinets with thousands of
drawers were alphabetically arranged in neat piles the titles of the books with
the codes in case I wanted to order them. Now from that to getting the book
there was a time distance of at least 30 min. Well it took most of my time to
order those books not to mention finding the answer to my questions.
Now I see how different from those times the present time is.
Nowadays for any question that arises be it of scientific or household nature,
one only has to google it to find the answer. One literally has the world at
one’s fingertips. There is almost everything on the Internet, even libraries
with e-books. What a jump in time and technology in only such a short period of
time (approximately 12 years since I first heard about Internet in Moldova)!
And the searching tools have replaced for most of us those huge wall cabinets
with thousands of drawers (they still exist in the libraries though) that took
a lot of time to browse and find what you need. Now there is Google, Bing, Ask,
Rambler, Yandex and a lot of other searching engines that will do that for us:
will shuffle through all those virtual “drawers” and provide us not only with
one answer but with thousands of them.
In Week 2 of this course I have discovered that along with
general purpose search engines there are specialized search engines. Just like
with dictionaries. There are general monolingual English dictionaries that
would provide you with general information about any word you encounter in the
English language and there are specialized dictionaries for technical, medical,
linguistic terms for example and those will give you complete information on
the term you need. This is the same with search engines. If you look for
something general then Google is perfect. But if you look for academic sources
it is more likely that you will find them with the help of some specialized
search engines.
Also, Internet is a very "dangerous" place for children. We adults have the ability to discriminate good from bad and sort out the right information while children get caught in "the net" of less desirable sites, come across information which is less reliable or even harmful for their vulnerable minds but they take it as an absolute truth or a "religion" to follow just because some site had it this way. Children have more trust in all they read and question less than us. This is why it is good to refer them to academic sites and to teach them use the children friendly searching engines. And how good to know there is such a thing as children friendly searching engines!
