Abstract
More and more often, search engines are used by students as a tool to access information on the Web. This has the potential to affect the learning activities conducted by students. In this paper, the project “In WWW veritas?” is presented. The project has the following objectives: (1) to investigate how searches carried out on the Web through search engines can lead to different results based on different criteria; (2) to increase students awareness on how search engines “filters” can work and thus lead to a different perception of reality; (3) to stimulate critical thinking in the use of searching tools on the Web to fully exploit their potential. The project involved students of a high school in northern part of Italy. They examined the results presented by a popular search engine on selected controversial topics and tried to support or contrast the different points of view through a role-playing game. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of results showed an increased students’ awareness on the presence of filters through which the search engines provide information. Moreover, the activities undertaken into the project were also effective in developing critical thinking processes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Langville, A.N., Meyer, C.D.: Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2011)
Zhang, J., Lin, S.: Multiple language supports in search engines. Online Inf. Rev. 31(4), 516–532 (2007)
Rogers, R.: Digital Methods. MIT Press, Cambridge (2013)
Rogers, R., Jansen, F., Stevenson, M., Weltevrede, E.: Mapping democracy. In: Global Information Society Watch 2009, pp. 47–57. Association for Progressive Communications and Hivos (2009)
Fulantelli, G., Marenzi, I., Ijaz, A., Taibi, D.: SaR-Web – a tool to support search as learning processes. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop Search as Learning (SAL) 2016 at the ACM SIGIR 2016 (2016)
Taibi, D., Fulantelli, G., Marenzi, I., Nejdl, W., Rogers, R., Ijaz, A.: SaR-WEB: a semantic web tool to support search as learning practices and cross-language results on the web. In: IEEE 17th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), Timisoara, pp. 522–524 (2017)
Cardon, D.: Che cosa sognano gli algoritmi. Le nostre vite al tempo dei big data. Mondadori Università. De Carolis, C. (Translator) (2016)
Averame, M.C.: Riconoscere le fake news in classe. Percorsi per una comunica-zione consapevole in rete. Collana “insegnare nel XXI secolo”. Pearson (2018)
Acknowledgments
Students and teachers of the high school “G. Peano - S. Pellico” in Cuneo (Italy).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Taibi, D., Fulantelli, G., Basteris, L., Rosso, G., Puvia, E. (2020). How Do Search Engines Shape Reality? Preliminary Insights from a Learning Experience. In: Popescu, E., Hao, T., Hsu, TC., Xie, H., Temperini, M., Chen, W. (eds) Emerging Technologies for Education. SETE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11984. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38778-5_40
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38778-5_40
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38777-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38778-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)