This past Monday, Upper Arlington High School library/?media specialist Judy Deal uttered a phrase close to my heart.“Words matter,” she said, speaking to Language Arts teacher Melissa Hasebrook’s Community School English class.
But she wasn’t talking--as I often do--about the words they read on paper, the words they use to form an argument or the words they twist and turn in an effort to stitch together the narratives of their lives.
She was talking about the words they use to search.
The words they type into Google, Amazon, Yahoo, or Bing.
And she told them that words matter after they had the opportunity to hear her husband, Tim Deal, speak to them on Google Hangout about his relationship with search terms.
Tim chooses words for a living. As a Senior Strategist for IBM iX, he gets paid to know which terms people use the most when they’re conducting searches, so clients can increase their SEO for a particular product.
Or in his words, “IBM iX (interactive experience) helps brands relate to their customers so they help companies figure out what their customers want online.”
To show students how he does that, he pulled up Google Trends and generated a comparative search between the terms “bathing suit” and “swim suit.”
As you can see from the results, most people use swim suit. That means if a company uses “swim suit” instead of “bathing suit” in a label, descriptor, or a tag, they can increase the odds Google, Amazon, Bing or Yahoo algorithms will spit out their product in the mix of results. He also talked to students about the way “hits” are determined, the way products or companies are “ranked,” and the way all of that informs his work day in and day out.
Once Mr. Deal explained his real-world relationship with words, Mrs. Deal talked to the class about how they could “avoid getting manipulated,” how they could take control of the information they received on the internet. Not only did she want them to find more success in their research for school, she wanted them to understand how to get around being manipulated in every other part of their lives.
To demonstrate how, she and Hasebrook conducted a search on Hurricane Harvey by simply typing those words directly into the Google search bar. Their effort produced an enormous number of “hits,” and those hits were prioritized by ads, or by the popularity of the sites, not necessarily by the quality of information. In order to take a little more control of what came up, Deal put quotation marks around “Hurricane Harvey” and by doing that, they were able to reduce the hits from 158,000,000 to 96,000,000.
In an effort to hone in even further, Deal typed “Hurricane Harvey” in quotations and “Climate Change” in quotations. Doing this took the results from 96,000,000 to 3,000,000.
Next she showed them what would happen if they wanted to get specific about the types of sites they requested. Her example was including “.org” in the search bar in quotations next to the other two search terms. When she did this, the hits went down to 244,000.
While 244,000 is still too many hits to sift through, it is substantially less than the 158,000,000 that came up originally. By employing a demonstrative think aloud, showing students each step of her search, Deal wanted to demonstrate how being specific shifts your position. With careful thought, she was able to take control of her information; she was able to move from the passive recipient of what companies wanted her to have, to the pursuer of information that she, herself, wanted to get.
Once she armed students with search strategies, Hasebrook and Deal dove into evaluative strategies. They pulled up an article on factcheck.org.
“How would you know if this site was credible or not?” Hasebrook asked the class.
“I would look at the ads,” one student said.
“I would check out the ‘About Us’ section,” another student said, “and then Google the author.”
They pulled up the about us section. They Googled the author.
“What do you think?” Deal asked, and the students paused to consider.
“It says non-partisan, and non-profit,” one student read.
“Why does that matter?” Hasebrook challenged.
“Because it means they are not affiliated with a party or making a profit.”
“You’re defining the terms, but not saying why they matter.”
“They matter because it means no money is driving the agenda, and there isn’t a political party affiliation driving it either.”
“Well, I think it is conservative,” another student piped in, “because the graphics and fonts look older and outdated. They don’t even have Instagram and the icons are all the old ones.”
Another said, “But the ‘Ask us a Question’ seems Democratic to me.”
A third student sat, shaking her head. “I think it’s dangerous,” she said, “to call types marketing strategies Republican or Democrat. We need to rely on reading not the graphics.”
And the room took that in. Both Hasebrook and Deal said they never even considered font or images in the way they perceived political bias, but thought it was fascinating that so many students did.
Hasebrook then told the class that the site Deal pulled up was straight down the middle in terms of bias, and Deal shared an infographic showing where various news sources fit along the continuum of conservative and liberal.
When asked to consider how to use the graphic, one student said she would search a topic in multiple publications throughout the political spectrum so she could formulate a complete understanding of an issue before she made her own decisions.
Considering the current public debate regarding what is or isn’t news, what is or isn’t reliable, or which opinions are or are not worthy of consideration, I happen to think that 16 year-old’s strategy is pretty darn wise.
And that is why this lesson matters.
It matters beyond the assignment Hasebrook will eventually give them.
It matters because Hasebrook herself admitted that when she was looking to get a new car this summer, she researched reviews, pricing and other detailed information about the vehicles she considered purchasing, but even though she “did” her homework, after considering her search through the lens of something like Google Analytics, she said, “half of my results were manipulated and I didn’t realize it at the time. I didn’t think of it like that until now.”
It matters because if we have a well-read, well-versed researcher having that type of epiphany, then we know Mr. and Mrs. Deal hit on something pretty powerful.
It matters also because it connects with other subject areas.
Before Hasebrook could even give students an assignment, an organic application cropped up in class. Because the other Community School teachers were positioned in the back of the room during Deal’s lesson, and heard the information Deal shared, they were able to connect it to what they were doing.
Near the end of the discussion, science teacher, Lynn Reese jumped into the mix.
“Please reference everything she went over today,” Reese said to the students in the room, “and be ready to apply it in my class tomorrow.”
Just the day before, Reese had asked her students to research the potential impacts of climate change. She said the searches her students engaged in did not meet her expectations. She planned to ask them to redo the work, but because she heard Deal’s lesson on Monday, she was able to make literal connections between what Deal presented, and what she wanted her students to do that Tuesday. Hasebrook said that later in the week one of her students came up and told her that she used Deal’s tips and managed to find exactly what she needed to find for her science class.
That, right there, is what all of us want.
We want students to make connections, to recognize the significance of the lessons we teach, to actually apply what they spend so many hours trying to learn, to do exactly what that student did, transferring knowledge from English to Science. Or what Mrs. Deal did when she brought the outside world in and showed students how to bring the classroom world back out.