I rarely give a talk about the inquiry class where I am not asked "can't students just Google this?" or "how do you stop students from Googling the answers?" -- And last* week on a listserv, Andy Johnson posted "Is the smartphone killing inquiry?" - about how students are ruining the inquiry in his classroom by using smartphones. The overwhelming response was either "ask better questions" / "let them google." Meanwhile, Kim posted a link to this post, arguing for using laptops in classrooms that has a similar claim. Briefly, the post argues that if we forbid the use of the internet "we are closing the door on what is real and relevant in student lives... we send a message that we are not interested in the way they process information, in the way they communicate and connect with their peers, in how they learn. The closed-laptop policy states very clearly: only one kind of learning is tolerated in this room."**
I sympathize with this position - using the internet to search out answers is a reasonable and scientific thing to do when faced with a question that has already been answered or when trying to understand a new (to you) topic. To force students to turn off the internet can feel contrived - like we're making things unnecessarily difficult and too far removed from what actual scientists (and rational students) do. It's the kind of thing that signals "we're doing a school activity, not a scientific activity." And this is a response I often give -- and, generally speaking, believe. I have iPads and laptops in my classroom and (with maybe one exception) never ban the use of the internet outright.
But I don't think Andy is wrong when he says the internet "effectively put[s] really bad textbooks into my students’ hands whether I like it or not" and there are times I really don't want my students to google - for good reason. So (1) why it might be a pedagogically good thing to ban use of the internet (and what might that look like) and (2) when do students choose not to google? - That is, what is it like when I (1) create a classroom in which I (for good pedagogical reasons) don't want students to google and (2) they (for good reason) don't want to google. (Separate, but also good question: what can I do so that students use google the way that scientists do?)
As to (1), the crux of my thinking is this: Classrooms aren't scientific labs -- even in classrooms without textbooks or lab manuals or Pasco lab equipment, where we ask students to engage in making sense of the world in deeply scientific ways, we are, nonetheless, in a classroom. I spend a lot of my time thinking about and arguing for "doing science" in science classrooms, but it's a very particular kind of thing I'm calling "science." And in the classroom we are creating a little pedagogical world that should connect with the broader scientific world, but it is not synonymous with it, and introducing scientists' answers into these spaces sometimes ruins the game/world/experience, rendering the inquiry less scientific. Because googling "answers" can mean that students are not treating the question scientifically - they're not treating it as a problem they can reason about and answer, a problem that is theirs to ponder and for which they can invent solutions.
It's certainly a contrivance - but scientists construct novel answers to questions that cannot be googled. And if we want students to engage scientifically in questions that are tractable for them, and around topics we know to be important, this might mean that they are investigating questions for which there are ready answers online. We can think of 'banning' the internet as a scaffold of sorts - it allows them to investigate accessible questions in scientific ways. And many "scaffolds" deliberately distance students from more authentic practices: beginning flute players put little plugs in the holes on the flute keys so their fingers can focus on just hitting the key - and not covering the hole; they play etudes - not concertos; they visibly tap out time with their toes. In general, the student knows that the contrivance is a help rather than a nuisance.
So that brings me to (2) - how do students understand the role of the internet (or its ban)? If students think the goal of the game being played is that they acquire canonical descriptions of scientific ideas, then it's a challenging task to convince them that the most effective way to develop those ideas is by first carefully considering their own ideas. But if students understand that the game is to immerse themselves in a problem that they can reason about and invent solutions - and if they enjoy playing that kind of game - then (maybe) seeking internet answers is like taking the plugs out of the holes (I need a better analogy). It actually makes it harder to play the game. - I think Brian has examples of this - where a student brought in an internet explanation of the phases of the moon, and the other students were perturbed. And not because this student had cheated, but because the explanation was not useful to them and the game they were playing.
One other thought:
I can imagine a response: "find better questions, questions that are very specific to their ideas, data and models so that they cannot google" -- but I don't know if those are better questions or just different questions. Should I forgo a whole range of really fantastic questions just because they are easily googled? And isn't that, essentially, just a creative way of forbidding google anyway?
* "last week" was true when I started writing this. It has taken a while to finish.
**also, I want to note that I kind of hate this phrase: "the way they process information" - as if those crazy kids have cyborg brains
