Boolify

Dave Crusoe wrote to tell me about this new search tool that he and his team have been developing to teach children effective research.  He writes:

"One of the challenges of web searching is that while it's important for kids to know how to conduct good searches, e.g., for research, the common textual tools do a poor job of modeling, for kids, the impact that their boolean has on results. As you can guess, good results inform good research.

"So, we've worked with a team of librarians and others to develop something called Boolify, a graphical search tool meant for K12 use.   It pulls results from Google's SafeSearch (Strict), so it's reasonably classroom-safe, and we get the best of both worlds: a great way to understand and build searches, as well as great results provided by Google."

Boolify

Comments

[Lars Hyland]

Jane,

Thanks for pointing me to this. It's a great example of how to tackle one of the new basic skills of the early 21st Century. In fact many adults could do with using tools like this to better understand how to search well, critique and filter the results.

See my post on Knowledge Loses its Luster that comments on what Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason", observes as two worrying trends among younger people: anti-intellectualism (the belief that "too much learning can be a dangerous thing") and anti-rationalism (the idea that "there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion").

Tools like Boolify will help us all learn to use online content in more sophisticated and objective ways.