On Thursday, a group of high school teachers and I had the occasion to lament the lack of researching skills that students (and sometimes adults) have. It seems that fewer and fewer researchers go deep, beyond the first four or five hits from a Google search or the Wikipedia entry. To these researchers, electronic databases, books, and diverse opinions are foreign concepts.

Today, during my twitter break, I saw the following tweet from Alec Couros:

courosa: Watch this TED Talk today http://youtu.be/B8ofWFx525s

This tweet intrigued me. First, Alec is a great filter who usually shares important, thought provoking material. Secondly, Alec usually suggest or offers something up, he rarely issues a statement like this. Curious, I clicked through to find the following TED Talk which was released yesterday:

Eli Pariser presents a very compelling argument. As teachers, when we assign students a research topic and we know that they are going to only delve into the first five or six (if we are lucky) hits on Google, how are we going to know that they can we insure that they will get to the information which will help them answer the questions or make new connections? How can we help learners understand that individual results are being delivered to them that may or may not be helpful in their quest? How do we move learners to expand their toolkit beyond these personalized results?

I then flashback to a video which was produced in 2004, about EPIC 2014. It is eerie how true this piece of fiction is becoming: