This New York Times article about search is fascinating. As much as I found the general peek into the power of a company like Google insightful, I think the article points to long-term implications for educators.

As we continue to think about the productive world that our teens are engaging within, how students navigate online, how students question the content they seek, produce, or encounter, and how students promote or validate sources is going to become a crucial part of their critical literacy development.

While traditional critical literacy and even critical media literacy engage in evaluating the power structures underlying authorship and production, this literacy is expanding to include how this information is found, suppressed, promoted. “White hat” and “black hat” optimization (whether knowingly or unknowingly as J.C. Penny claim in the article) are part of the components of critical literacy that educators could not have foreseen.

More than simply teaching students how to use critically the tools of search that are available (from Google to library catalogs to online databases like ERIC and DataQuest), we will need to engage in an inquiry into how results are yielded, how to parse metadata, and to question the programming structures at hand.  Program or be programmed indeed. Perhaps educators should be demanding a large place at the table at this summit?

Time for a new course of study. If you haven’t read the article yet, please take a look.