The Google generation represents a fundamental threat to university education as we know it. Discuss.

This question is tackled by experts in Times Higher Education (June 4), on the back of a briefing paper by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research at University College London. Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future asks: How will universities cope with a generation of students raised on a diet of web-based “facts at their fingertips”?

Over-reliance on the web may compromise students' capacity for “creative and independent thinking”, finds the report. However, it adds that shallow, web-based research methods are not unique to students: “Power browsing appears to be the norm ... from undergraduates to professors.”

Libraries may form part of the cure - and the cause - academics say. One expert says that library staff can help students to reverse what they've learnt through social-networking sites and Google. But another says that students may be using Google largely because of library underfunding.

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“The higher-quality materials are not available to them on or off line,” says Tara Brabazon, professor of media at the University of Brighton. She says that Google in itself is not the problem, but students' over-reliance “on any single platform or media [outlet]”. But US research suggests that academics may struggle to undo such behaviour. “It is too late to reverse-engineer deeply ingrained habits, notably an uncritical trust in branded search engines to deliver quick fixes.”
ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber/

'Daft' policy stifles web expansion

It would seem that the dot-gov bubble has burst.

Councils are being refused the right to register new .gov.uk web domains under rules laid down by a central government committee, Local Government Chronicle (June 5) reports.

There is a policy of “presumption of rejection” to applications from local government bodies wanting to set up official sites, according to documents released by the Central Office of Information.

Richard Steel, chief information officer at Newham LBC, called the policy daft, claiming that domains would increasingly be needed for shared services projects.

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