Learning by Google
In the learning industry, we are often so absorbed with formal learning methods that we often forget just how successful informal learning can be – whether it’s good or bad. Welcome to ‘learning by Google’ the world’s number one learning resource.
There’s a commonly held belief, especially in the UK, that adults are exceptionally poor at lifelong learning. There seems to be some truth in it: most of us don’t relish the idea of training and are often openly sceptical about it. Perhaps our less-than-ideal schooling set our lifelong expectations of learning as dull chalk-and-talk classroom sessions. Perhaps we just don’t enjoy learning.
A better theory is that we don’t enjoy learning when we don’t need to – which is another way of saying that learning is more engaging (and memorable) when it is delivered at the point of need.
That’s a great theory, but in practice learning can’t always be like that. Training projects, for example, intend to deliver training just before the point of need, so there is potentially a disconnection between learning and doing.
It’s also often the case that learning isn’t immediately accessible – you come across a situation where you don’t know what to do, and if a learning framework isn’t in place to provide a solution (which could be an at-desk mentor, an e-learning system, a reference system or knowledge base) then you’re up the proverbial creek. Or you were until Google came along.
It’s almost not fair to single out Google, since it wasn’t the first search engine on the Internet, far from it. But it is the most successful, by far. The cause of its success is one thing: it’s great at bringing back relevant results. BG (before Google) search engines were a hit-and-miss affair which would bring back pages of junk before anything useful. Google nailed the idea of finding exactly what you’re looking for, and, by and large, that’s what it delivers.
So, when you want to know something, where do you go? An encyclopaedia? An e-learning system? The library? Phone a friend? Nope, almost 80% of us ask Google.
It seems almost perfect. Fast results, pretty much when you need them. Except that it’s not Google providing the answers: they just provide the route to the answers – and the answers may or may not be correct.
And there’s the rub: there’s as much misinformation on the Internet as there is information, and Google’s results system is (broadly) based around the popularity of pages which might have the answer. It’s as easy to get a wrong answer as it is to get a right one. And how would you know whether it’s right or not? If lots of people believe it, then it’s as likely to spread as the truth.
Take the 1980s Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch, ‘Gerald the intelligent gorilla’ which (purely in jest) said that the collective noun for baboons was a ‘flange’ (it’s actually a ‘troop’ or ‘congress’). As many references to this joke name are to be found in the top results of Google as are references to the correct one – and Google contains around 1000 references to a ‘flange of baboons’ – and the phrase has even begun to be used by some professionals and found its way creeping into reference texts (no, really). True, the number of correct definitions on Google is much larger (around 166,000) – but the popularity of the incorrect ones pushes them high up the search results.
That’s the risk of Google in the context of organisational learning. Your people have easy and fast access to it, they’re used to using it and they (largely) believe what it tells them. It’s faster and easier for them to learn the wrong thing, than it is to be taught the right thing. And, as is well known, those who are self-taught often learn a long-winded or inefficient way of doing things.
Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t provide a way for people to learn, they’ll find a way themselves. It’s a sobering thought: if you don’t provide the right training for your workforce, you can be sure that they’ll be playing a kind of learning Russian Roulette with Google.
Daniel Hanlon
Blog date
02 July 2007
